Innovation in Child Healthcare Delivery Lab
Led by Dr. Tumaini Coker, our lab uses a community-engaged approach to develop innovative ways to deliver healthcare. The lab’s current research includes investigating, designing and implementing new methods of delivering primary care services to children in low-income communities. Our goal is to reduce socioeconomic and racial/ethnic disparities in child health and healthcare.
We partner with community clinics, primary care offices and school-based clinics in Washington and California. We are currently developing partnerships with primary care offices throughout the United States.
Publications
See a complete list of Coker’s publications on PubMed.
Investigator Biography
Tumaini Rucker Coker, MD, MBA
Tumaini Rucker Coker, MD, MBA, is division head of General Pediatrics and a professor of pediatrics at the University of Washington School of Medicine and Seattle Children’s. Dr. Coker leads a successful and extramurally funded research program with a focus on community-engaged design, adaptation, testing and dissemination of preventive care delivery models. She is the former and founding research director of the Health Equity Research Program at Seattle Children’s Center for Diversity and Health Equity, and currently serves as the co-director of the University of Washington’s NIH-funded Child Health Equity Research Fellowship.
As a general pediatrician and community-engaged health services researcher, Dr. Coker’s research focuses on community-partnered pediatric primary care delivery design to promote health equity and eliminate health and healthcare disparities for Black and Latinx children and families in low-income communities. Her primary research is in partnership with community clinics and the parents they serve, and has focused on the design, implementation and testing of new models of care that integrate community health workers into the delivery of early childhood preventive care. Dr. Coker has also conducted research to elucidate inequities in behavioral health for Black and Latinx children, with a focus on delivery system interventions needed to improve access and utilization of care.
Her research has been funded by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities, the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute and the Health Resources and Services Administration. Dr. Coker served as a member of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ Bright Futures 4th edition National Preventive Care Guidelines Expert Panel. Dr. Coker is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine, and previously served as chair for the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s (NASEM) consensus report, Addressing the Long-Term Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Children and Families, as a committee member for the NASEM consensus report, Implementing High-Quality Primary Care: Rebuilding the Foundation of Health Care, and is a member of the NASEM Standing Committee on Primary Care. Dr. Coker is also a member of the United States Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF).
Dr. Coker practices primary care and teaches medical students and residents at Seattle Children’s Odessa Brown Children’s Clinic.
Dr. Coker earned her bachelor's degree in psychology at Stanford University, a master's in business administration at the UCLA Anderson School of Management, and her medical degree at the Drew/UCLA Medical Program at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, where she was elected to the Alpha Omega Alpha Honor Medical Society. She completed her internship and residency in pediatrics at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, and a postdoctoral fellowship with the Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program at the University of Chicago. Before joining the faculty at the University of Washington School of Medicine, s