Gwen Lapham, PhD, MPH, MSW, is a Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute (KPWHRI) associate investigator and addictions health services researcher.  She is also an assistant affiliate professor in the Department of Health Systems and Population Health at the University of Washington and an assistant professor in the Department of Health Systems Science at the Kaiser Permanente Bernard J. Tyson School of Medicine. She has more than 15 years’ experience in implementation and evaluation research to improve the prevention and treatment of unhealthy substance use in medical settings, first at Veterans Affairs (VA) Puget Sound and now at Kaiser Permanente Washington. She has led analyses of large national and multisite real-world datasets and collaborated on diverse research focused on improving care for substance use.

Since joining KPWHRI, Dr. Lapham has capitalized on her social work and health services training to do impactful research on evidence-based primary care for unhealthy substance use, including alcohol, opioid, and cannabis use. She is currently co-leading a pragmatic, cluster-randomized, effectiveness-implementation trial testing 2 interventions to systematically implement shared decision-making for primary care patients with an alcohol use disorder. She is co-investigator for a study developing a patient decision aid to support discontinuation of long-term opioid therapy and another study designed to assess the social and behavioral determinants of health that impact medications for opioid use disorder. Dr. Lapham’s current research is also focused on evaluating the adverse health risks associated with cannabis use among primary care patients, including use among pregnant individuals, as well as testing the effectiveness of integrated behavioral health care, including routine substance use and suicide risk screening, for teens in primary care.