Provides services and technical assistance for students so they benefit from research-based curricula taught in safe environments.

Produces and disseminates information to provide motivation and tools to enable individuals to make informed decisions about health issues.

Develops and implements education testing programs that benefit students, parents and public officals.

Works with the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), the government's primary source for collecting and analyzing data about public education.

Helps to provide all children with access to a quality education, and empowers people, organizations, and communities to bring about social change.

Is committed to helping clients improve the effectiveness of their workforce through a wide range of management, organizational, and business improvement efforts.

Produces, maintains and disseminates systematic reviews of the effects of social and behavioral interventions.

Margarita P. Hurtado, Ph.D., M.H.S., M.A.

Principal Research Scientist

Margarita P. Hurtado, Ph.D., M.H.S., M.A., is a health services researcher with expertise in quality of care, primary care and minority health. She is Project Director on a study for the TRICARE Medical Activity to develop a provider survey to assess patient centered care and examine how it may be influenced by organizational culture. On CAHPS II for the Agency for Healthcare Quality and Research (AHRQ), her work as Task Leader focuses on consumer survey development, quality improvement based on patient reports of care, and survey translation and cultural adaptation. She is also conducting qualitative research based on focus groups and interviews for the development of bilingual health education materials on a project for CDC. As Project Task Leader on NHLBI’s “Your Heart, Your Health Program,” she conducted an evaluation of the community health promoters based program and led the development of a bilingual Web-based training module on physical activity for Latino health promoters and community members. She was Senior Advisor on an OMH project to promote patient-centered care through the development of Cultural Competency Curriculum Modules for Family Physicians and Principal Investigator on a project to support the CMS Doctor’s Office Quality project.

At the Institute of Medicine (IOM) she was Study Director for AHRQ’s National Healthcare Quality Report. She was a consultant for the Pan American Health Organization on primary care and health system reform and worked in the Ministry of Health in Colombia. She is a member of the Editorial Board of the International Journal for Quality in Health Care and serves on an IOM subcommittee on performance measures. Dr. Hurtado also teaches a course on international health systems in Ecuador and is an Associate at the JHU School of Public Health where she has taught in the Department of Health Policy and Management. She was the recipient of a National Research Service Award from NIH, a Primary Care Fellow at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, and a recipient of the Marilyn Bergner Award for Health Services Research, and the John Hume Award for her dissertation research.