Biography

Richard K. Leuchter, MD, is a hospitalist-researcher and assistant professor who joined the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) faculty in July 2022 after completing a National Institutes of Health research training year in applied mathematics and machine learning. His research focuses on identifying low-value medical care (particularly in the acute care setting) and implementing interventions to reduce it. Dr. Leuchter has also obtained formal training in medical informatics and draws on this in his research by integrating his interventions into the electronic health records and leveraging principles of behavioral psychology to maximize their impact. His work has received numerous awards, coverage in the Los Angeles Times, and been published in journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, and Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association. Currently, he has a National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute K award to design machine-learning models that can predict unnecessary hospitalizations, which form the basis for a hospital avoidance clinic (called Next Day Clinic) he launched and is evaluating in a clinical trial. Dr. Leuchter is a practicing hospitalist primarily at UCLA Health and Olive View, and holds a joint appointment at the West Los Angeles VA. He also serves as co-director of the UCLA Nudge Unit and assistant director of UCLA Healthcare Value Analytics and Solutions.

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