Center for Health Equity Research and Promotion

Profile

Dr. Chrissy Kistler is a Family Medicine physician with additional certification in Geriatrics and Hospice and Palliative Medicine. She is a health services researcher with a focus on improving the appropriateness of complex medical decision-making, especially for older adults.  She is currently the PI of a randomized control trial, “Improving Primary Care Clinicians' Advance Care Planning for Alzheimer's Disease and Related Dementias.” She has additional expertise assessing the quality-of-care older adults receive though her training with the Veterans’ Affairs Quality Scholars program.  She served as one of the 6 Hub PIs for the “PREVENTABLE (PRagmatic EValuation of evENTs And Benefits of Lipid-lowering in oldEr Adults)” trial, the largest pragmatic trial in US older adults to date using 20,000 participants to examine the links between statins and ADRD, organizing 11 sites, and was the site PI for University of North Carolina (UNC) which consistently ranked in the top 10 recruitment sites. She has been a site-PI and co-investigator on several other NIH funded studies bringing her expertise in geriatrics and medical decision-making, particularly in long-term care, infection control, and advance care planning for people with dementia.  New areas of her research are in telehealth use in long-term care and pharmacogenetics in long-term care.