G. Gill Richards Endowed Lecture 

The G. Gill Richards Endowed Lecture was established in 1973 by Harlow Gill Richards, Hope Richards Burton and Lacy F. Richards (Dr. Richards’ children) to honor their father. It is the second oldest endowed lectureship in the Department of Internal Medicine.

On September 7, 2017 we were pleased to hear from Lisa Rubenstein, MD, MSPH, Professor Emeritus of Medicine and Public Health at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) David Geffen School of Medicine and the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health Senior Natural Scientist, RAND. She presented a valuable lecture entitled "Improving Care for Complex Patients: What will it take to make and show a real-world difference?"

Please join us for more endowed lectureships as part of our Grand Rounds series. 

About Lisa Rubenstein, MD, MSPH

Lisa Rubenstein is a natural scientist at the RAND Corporation and an emeritus professor of medicine and public health at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). She is a former Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar, past president of the Society of General Internal Medicine, and former board member of Academy Health. She founded and led the Center for the Study of Healthcare Provider Behavior, now the Center for the Study of Healthcare Innovation, Implementation and Policy, a consortium of health researchers at the Veterans Affairs (VA) Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System, UCLA, and RAND that supports funded implementation science work on HIV/hepatitis C, women's health, mental health, geriatrics and long-term care, genomics, and primary care.

Rubenstein focuses on redesigning health care systems through quality improvement and implementation research. She developed and tested an approach she has termed Evidence-Based Quality Improvement by partnering with 8 different managed care organizations and in the VA over the past two decades. The approach is designed to help healthcare organizations develop improvement innovations that reflect multi-level, interdisciplinary leader and frontline perspectives and that also reflect best available science. Study results show a variety of population-based patient, provider, and system outcome improvements; rigorous qualitative research shows strong approval for the approach by both leadership and frontline participants.

She has extensive experience designing quality measures for a wide variety of purposes, including national evaluations of inpatient and nursing home pressure ulcers, inpatient myocardial infarction and cerebrovascular accident, outpatient care for depression and outpatient care for alcohol misuse. She has also developed measures for providing timely, actionable feedback to outpatient primary care sites on care continuity, team functioning, patient and provider satisfaction, and provider and staff burnout. She works on improving implementation science through expert consensus and evidence review with the Southern California Evidence-Based Practice Center, based at RAND. She implemented and evaluated collaborative care for depression inside and outside of the VA, and is leading a Patient-Centered Medical Home/Patient-Aligned Care Teams demonstration laboratory that supports and evaluates VA's national implementation of accountable, patient-centered primary care. She also recently led and continues to support the evaluation for a national five site demonstration on caring for patients at highest risk of hospitalization in VA.

She received her M.D. from the Albert Einstein School of Medicine and her MSPH from UCLA and is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians.

About the G. Gill Richards, MD Endowed Lectureship

The G. Gill Richards, M.D. Endowed Lectureship was established to honor the work of the late Dr. G. Gill Richards. G. Gill Richards, MD, FACP, was born in 1883 in Mendon, Utah. He attended college at the University of Utah and earned his medical degree from the University of Bellevue Hospital Medical College in 1906. Afterward, he returned to Salt Lake City to enter practice with his father, and did post-graduate work in Vienna and Berlin in 1910 and 1912. In 1915. He was one of the founders of the Salt Lake Clinic, and was a member of the Dr. W.H. Groves Latter-Day Saints Hospital staff for over forty years. During that time, he was the Clinical Professor of Medicine at the University of Utah College of Medicine, a charter Diplomat of the American Board of Internal Medicine, and one of the first fellows in Utah to the American College of Physicians. At one time, he was the chairman of the section in Internal Medicine for the American Medical Association. In the early 1940s, Dr. Richards was one of only four physicians in Salt Lake City with formal training in Internal Medicine. In 1949, he was awarded as an outstanding physician.

Dr. Richards was a master clinician. He made diagnoses by carefully obtaining detailed case histories and by using his senses in physical examination. A great bedside teacher, he loved to gather a group of medical students or house staff around a bed, where he would ask one to examine the heart disease patient and describe what murmurs one could expect to hear. Dr. Richards’ warm personality inspired confidence in his patients, many of whom said they felt better as soon as he came into the room. He literally followed his patients who needed surgery right into the operating room. He would poke his head through the door and ask the surgeon what he had found. If necessary, he would put on a cap and mask and go to the surgeon’s side for a better look. He was keenly interested in correlating the clinical history and findings with the surgical or pathological findings.

Dr. Richards was particularly dedicated to the promulgation of excellent teaching in the neglected skills of history taking and physical examination, and was viewed by his peers as a painstakingly careful clinician in his evaluations of his patients. He died suddenly of a heart attack in 1950 while attending the annual convention of the American College of Physicians in Boston.

In addition to leaving the legacy of his medical career, Dr. Richards belonged to a large family of Salt Lake City physicians. His father, Stephen L. Richards, and uncle, Joseph Richards, were leading Utah physicians. His son, Harlow Richards, practiced in Salt Lake City in allergy and immunology. His great granddaughter, Jodi Booth, graduated from the University of Utah School of Medicine in 2003.