Joyce Lee is the Robert P. Kelch, MD, Professor of Pediatrics at Michigan Medicine. She is a Pediatric Endocrinologist and clinical/health outcomes researcher and serves as  ACMIO for Pediatric Research, and Associate Chair of Health Metrics and Learning Health Systems for the Department of Pediatrics. Through these roles, she spends a lot of time redesigning data workflows in Epic, and visualizing and making sense of data using tools like Tableau. She has expertise in health outcomes research, quality improvement, and technology-focused studies in type 1 diabetes and childhood obesity.

Dr. Lee is a pediatric translational researcher focused on the overarching areas of type 1 diabetes and childhood obesity. She has used a variety of methodologies in her research, including applied clinical research, epidemiologic analyses of nationally representative data, state transition modeling, cost-effectiveness analysis, and design and emerging technologies (design ethnography, participatory design, human-centered design, quality improvement science, and digital/social media communications). To date, she has 120 peer-reviewed publications, and is first or senior author on 60 of those publications. Her major research contributions have included studies evaluating recommended screening guidelines for type 2 diabetes for overweight and obese children, studies evaluating the link between overweight and obesity and timing of puberty and chronic disease risk factors, studies focused on quality measurement and quality of care for overweight and obese children, and research in health outcomes for type 1 diabetes.

In 2009, Dr. Lee was named a Brehm Investigator by the Brehm Center for Type 1 Diabetes Research. In 2012, she was a visiting scholar in Child Health Policy at Stanford University, and in 2015 was a visiting scholar at Google Life Sciences (now Verily). At the 2016 Pediatric Academic Societies meeting, she was the first recipient of the Paul Kaplowitz, MD, Endowed Lectureship for contributions to quality and cost-effective care in Pediatric Endocrinology, an award sponsored by the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Pediatric Endocrine Society. She was named the Robert P. Kelch, MD, Research Professor of Pediatrics in 2016.

In 2018, Dr. Lee’s scholarship expanded to the creation of Learning Health Systems. To support this work, she completed the Advanced Methods in Quality Improvement course at Cincinnati Children’s (2018), became an Epic Physician Builder (2017), achieved proficiency in Clarity, the Epic database (2018), and has skills in the development of Tableau dashboards. Her roles as ACMIO, Associate Chair, and Ambulatory Care Clinical Chief allow her to support this LHS vision for pediatric health.

Her current LHS work focuses on two main areas:

1) Type 1 Diabetes: Collaboration with the T1D Exchange Quality Improvement Collaborative to improve the quality of care and health outcomes of individuals with type 1 Diabetes. Particular areas of interest include adoption of telemedicine, Epic tool development and Tableau dashboard development for support operations and QI, measurement of patient reported outcomes (i.e., psychosocial outcomes) using Health IT tools, and interventions to support data literacy and data engagement among parents of children with T1D.

2) Prevention and treatment of childhood overweight/obesity: She is focused on the development of a collaboration across the state of Michigan to reduce childhood overweight/obesity rates (funded by the Michigan Health Endowment Fund). Furthermore, she serves as Director of the newly formed Childhood Obesity Research Core (CORC), an NIH-funded core of the Michigan Nutrition Obesity Research Center, which enhances integration of childhood nutrition and obesity research into the clinical delivery system. Other areas of interest include collaborations with human computing interaction and machine learning/artificial intelligence experts to understand how data can be used to solve real world healthcare problems, biomarker discovery for prediabetes and type 2 diabetes in children, and the use of real-time CGM in prediabetes.