Courtney H Van Houtven, PhD – Research Career Scientist

Courtney H Van Houtven, PhD
Durham VA Medical Center
Durham, NC 

Courtney Van Houtven, PhD, MSc, trained as a health economist, is a Research Career Scientist at the Center of Innovation to Accelerate Discovery and Practice Transformation (ADAPT), Durham VA Health Care System. She is also a Professor of Medicine in the Department of Population Health Science at Duke University School of Medicine. Her research examines how family caregiving affects economic, health, and health care outcomes of care recipients and caregivers. Dr. Van Houtven is also interested in understanding how to best support family caregivers through pragmatic trials and strategies, including through better inclusion of caregivers as explicit members of the health care team. She strives to evaluate promising models of care, including how home-and community-based services can preserve Veteran independence and how the VA geriatric primary care medical home model of care affects quality of care and patient experience outcomes compared to usual primary care (IIR co-PI Nicki Hastings: 2017-2022). She directs the VA-CARES Partnered Evaluation Center, an ongoing national evaluation of VA's Caregiver Support Program (2014-2027) to rigorously assess supports and services affecting caregiver and Veteran quality of life and health system outcomes. She is co-PI on the QUERI Program Project, "Optimizing Function and Independence" (2016-2025), in which she is working with operational partners in VA, clinical field staff, and a multidisciplinary research team to implement a family caregiver skills training curriculum nationally. Her RIVR project is a stakeholder-engaged mixed methods study to develop a person-centered population-based measure of Veteran 'home time.' Dr. Van Houtven mentors 4 current CDA mentees (Boucher, Shepherd-Banigan, Jacobs, Kaufman) and is a consultant on one CDA (Wyman).

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