Connor David Drake

Connor Drake is a health services researcher and implementation scientist. His research interests are at the intersection of primary care, population health management, social determinants of health, chronic illness care redesign, and virtual care. He has experience with policy analysis, electronic health record data, mixed and multi methods, community engaged research, and implementation and dissemination methods. Dr. Drake's research projects include leveraging telemedicine and other clinical informatics to improve chronic illness care and population health management; developing and implementing behavioral interventions and 'whole-person' care models for patients with cardiovascular disease and metabolic disorders; and studying social care interventions to respond to social risk factors by promoting food security, housing stability, and social support to improve health outcomes.

Dr. Drake currently studies care models that feature food and nutrition security interventions (i.e., ‘Food is Medicine’) for patients at risk of food insecurity and at heightened cardiometabolic risk. This includes developing and testing scalable models for integrating food-based interventions—such as produce prescriptions—into clinical settings, investigating the relationships between food security and cardiometabolic health outcomes, and implementing social needs screening and response programs that promotes food security alongside other social determinants of health. Dr. Drake's research emphasizes implementation science approaches to understand how these ‘Food is Medicine’ programs can be best integrated and scaled across diverse healthcare settings, particularly in Veteran care settings and safety-net systems serving vulnerable populations.