Rachel Schwartz, PhD
Assistant Professor
Anesthesia
School of Medicine

She has expertise in implementation science and focuses on developing evidence-based innovations that facilitate alignment across stakeholders.

She is the lead editor of Emotion in the Clinical Encounter (McGraw Hill, 2021), a medical education textbook that provides clinicians with tools for navigating psychosocial aspects of the medical encounter.

Additional areas of interest include improving mentoring & sponsorship in academic medicine, exploring the unique professional needs of physician-scientists, and providing research mentorship on projects focusing on global health and underserved populations.

• Seven Empathy Myths: Correcting Misconceptions About a Complex Construct
  Social and Personality Psychology Compass 2025 Alison Jane Martingano, Sara Konrath, Danielle Blanch-Hartigan, Mark H. Davis, Judith A. Hall, Mollie A. Ruben, Justin J. Sanders, Rachel Schwartz
• What Is Clinical Empathy in Anesthesiology? Perspectives From Practicing Anesthesiologists
  A & A Practice 2025 Stosic, Morgan D.; Ruben, Mollie A.; Weaver, Adele E.; Blanch-Hartigan, Danielle; Sanders, Justin J.; Schwartz, Rachel; Jeong, Sunny; Lam, Ryan; Hall, Judith A.; Duong, Fred; Meyer, Elaine C.; Waisel,…
• Patient Perspectives and Concerns Regarding Cataract Surgery and Cataract Surgery Sedation: A Qualitative Study.
  Clinical ophthalmology (Auckland, N.Z.) 2025 Molina L, Lyang N, Schwartz R, Parikh N, Ramanathan S, Huang AJ, Chen CL
• Comparing GPT-4 and Human Researchers in Health Care Data Analysis: Qualitative Description Study.
  Journal of medical Internet research 2024 Li KD, Fernandez AM, Schwartz R, Rios N, Carlisle MN, Amend GM, Patel HV, Breyer BN
• Using Their Words to Shape Curricula: Targeted Well-Being Programming for Graduate Medical Education Trainees.
  Academic psychiatry : the journal of the American Association of Directors of Psychiatric Residency Training and the Association for Academic Psychiatry 2023 Anand U, Schwartz R, Stonnington CM
• On the proliferation of the empathy concept in healthcare and medical education research.
  Patient education and counseling 2023 Hall JA, Duong F, Schwartz R
• Developing a feedback-rich culture in academic medicine: the effect of coaching and 360-feedback on physician leadership.
  BMC medical education 2022 Schwartz R, Weimer-Elder B, Wilkins E, Deka D, Wong S, Dang BK, Brown R, Kline M, Kwan L
• Retaining Providers with Women's Health Expertise: Decreased Provider Loss Among VHA Women's Health Faculty Development Program Attendees.
  Journal of general internal medicine 2022 Farkas AH, Merriam S, Frayne S, Hardman L, Schwartz R, Kolehmainen C
• Reply to "Empathic communication: The premise of inclusive care for historically excluded populations".
  Cancer 2022 Schwartz R, Blanch-Hartigan D, Valbuena G, Weil A, Dubey M, Catzen HZ, Hall JA, Sanders JJ
• Physicians, emotion, and the clinical encounter: A survey of physicians' experiences.
  Patient education and counseling 2022 Schwartz R, Osterberg LG, Hall JA
• Reference-free discovery of nuclear SNPs permits accurate, sensitive identification of Carya (hickory) species and hybrids.
  Applications in plant sciences 2022 Literman RA, Ott BM, Wen J, Grauke LJ, Schwartz RS, Handy SM
• Empathy, an important but problematic concept.
  The Journal of social psychology 2022 Hall JA, Schwartz R
• The effect of a relationship-centered communication program on patient experience and provider wellness.
  Patient education and counseling 2021 Altamirano J, Kline M, Schwartz R, Fassiotto M, Maldonado Y, Weimer-Elder B
• Emotion in the Clinical Encounter
  2021 Schwartz, Rachel Hall, Judith A. Osterberg, Lars G.
• Using ethnographic methods to classify the human experience in medicine: a case study of the presence ontology.
  Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association : JAMIA 2021 Maitra A, Kamdar MR, Zulman DM, Haverfield MC, Brown-Johnson C, Schwartz R, Israni ST, Verghese A, Musen MA
• What is empathy? Oncology patient perspectives on empathic clinician behaviors.
  Cancer 2021 Sanders JJ, Dubey M, Hall JA, Catzen HZ, Blanch-Hartigan D, Schwartz R
• Physician empathy according to physicians: A multi-specialty qualitative analysis.
  Patient education and counseling 2021 Schwartz R, Dubey M, Blanch-Hartigan D, Sanders JJ, Hall JA
• Harnessing the Chaplain's Capacity to Identify Unmet Palliative Needs of Vulnerable Older Adults in the Emergency Department.
  Journal of palliative care 2021 Hamill Howard E, Schwartz R, Feldstein B, Grudzen M, Klein L, Piderman KM, Wang D
• What is clinical empathy? Perspectives of community members, university students, cancer patients, and physicians.
  Patient education and counseling 2020 Hall JA, Schwartz R, Duong F, Niu Y, Dubey M, DeSteno D, Sanders JJ
• Retaining VA Women's Health Primary Care Providers: Work Setting Matters.
  Journal of general internal medicine 2020 Schwartz R, Frayne SM, Friedman S, Romodan Y, Berg E, Haskell SG, Shaw JG
• How do laypeople define empathy?
  The Journal of social psychology 2020 Hall JA, Schwartz R, Duong F
• Can Patient-Provider Interpersonal Interventions Achieve the Quadruple Aim of Healthcare? A Systematic Review.
  Journal of general internal medicine 2020 Haverfield MC, Tierney A, Schwartz R, Bass MB, Brown-Johnson C, Zionts DL, Safaeinili N, Fischer M, Shaw JG, Thadaney S, Piccininni G, Lorenz KA, Asch SM, Verghese A, Zulman DM
• Practices to Foster Physician Presence and Connection With Patients in the Clinical Encounter.
  JAMA 2020 Zulman DM, Haverfield MC, Shaw JG, Brown-Johnson CG, Schwartz R, Tierney AA, Zionts DL, Safaeinili N, Fischer M, Thadaney Israni S, Asch SM, Verghese A
• Developing institutional infrastructure for physician wellness: qualitative Insights from VA physicians.
  BMC health services research 2020 Schwartz R, Shanafelt TD, Gimmler C, Osterberg L
• What is clinician presence? A qualitative interview study comparing physician and non-physician insights about practices of human connection.
  BMJ open 2019 Brown-Johnson C, Schwartz R, Maitra A, Haverfield MC, Tierney A, Shaw JG, Zionts DL, Safaeinili N, Thadaney Israni S, Verghese A, Zulman DM
• Neurologist Strategies for Optimizing the Parkinson's Disease Clinical Encounter.
  Journal of geriatric psychiatry and neurology 2019 Schwartz R, Trivedi R, Gray C, Lorenz KA, Zulman D
• "It's a disease of families": Neurologists' insights on how to improve communication and quality of life for families of Parkinson's disease patients.
  Chronic illness 2018 Schwartz R, Zulman D, Gray C, Goldstein MK, Trivedi R
• Empathy present and future.
  The Journal of social psychology 2018 Hall JA, Schwartz R
• Changing the Game for Hand Hygiene Conversations.
  Hospital pediatrics 2018 Schwartz R, Sharek PJ
• Unaltered emotional experience in Parkinson's disease: Pupillometry and behavioral evidence.
  Journal of clinical and experimental neuropsychology 2017 Schwartz R, Rothermich K, Kotz SA, Pell MD
• Current trends in the diagnosis and management of gestational diabetes mellitus in the United States.
  The journal of maternal-fetal & neonatal medicine : the official journal of the European Association of Perinatal Medicine, the Federation of Asia and Oceania Perinatal Societies, the International Society of Perinatal Obstetricians 2016 Bimson BE, Rosenn BM, Morris SA, Sasso EB, Schwartz RA, Brustman LE
• When emotion and expression diverge: The social costs of Parkinson's disease.
  Journal of clinical and experimental neuropsychology 2016 Schwartz R, Pell MD
• Mechanisms of change in cognitive therapy for obsessive compulsive disorder: role of maladaptive beliefs and schemas.
  Behaviour research and therapy 2014 Wilhelm S, Berman NC, Keshaviah A, Schwartz RA, Steketee G
• Emotional speech processing at the intersection of prosody and semantics.
  PloS one 2012 Schwartz R, Pell MD