Linda Fleisher PhD, MPH

Senior Scientist, The Center for Injury Research and Prevention; Adjunct Associate Research Professor, Cancer Prevention & Control – Fox Chase Cancer Center, Philadelphia, PA

Linda Fleisher, as a principal investigator (PI) at Fox Chase Cancer Center, has developed and led a broad array of health communications research projects. She has considerable experience in behavioral research, health education, development and evaluation of ehealth and mhealth interventions, health disparities, and patient/community engagement. She was the Project Director and PI for the National Cancer Institute (NCI) Cancer Information Service in the tristate area for more than 17 years, serving over a half million callers with in-depth information and resources addressing the continuum of cancer prevention, risk, detection, treatment, and survivorship. Building on this program, she developed a portfolio of pragmatic research focused on designing and implementing multimedia educational interventions through this service.

She also founded Fox Chase Cancer Center’s Patient Resource Education Center (REC) in 2000, which is one of the first multimedia patient education programs at a comprehensive cancer center, serving more than 30,000 people to date. The REC includes a LiveHelp online program for patients and consumers to ask questions with trained health educators and listings of recommended websites that are evaluated using a scientifically developed tool. She led the development of 3 comprehensive decision aids for patients with cancer and survivors as part of an NCI Program Project Grant. Linda has developed technical guides on health literacy and patient navigation for professionals, and brings these skills and knowledge to the development of patient education tools and resources. She has also led a team of professionals providing content development, literacy review, and usability testing for many web-based and ehealth tools. Her work has required building networks and partnerships with diverse audiences, including healthcare organizations, software developers, patients, and community leaders, in addition to a tristate health disparities network under the NCI’s Cancer Information Service and the current Cancer Health Disparities Network serving 19 states.

She is also co-PI on the Pennsylvania Patient Navigation Demonstration Project and co-founder of the Pennsylvania Patient Navigator Network. She recently joined the faculty at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia’s Center for Injury Research and Prevention, and is leveraging her extensive background in health communications, digital health, and partnerships to lead a digital health initiative focused on translating knowledge of evaluation and evidence to health app developers, distributors, and consumers to ensure that the explosion of mobile health tools is evidence-based and their impact on health improvement is validated.