Professional + Academic Background

Sara Ruth Epstein, is a Senior Program Manager with the Institute for Human Caring at Providence.  Her portfolio is currently focused on Age Friendly Care at Providence, as well as developing tools featured in the electronic medical record that support Advanced Care Planning.

Sara completed her undergraduate degree in cultural anthropology and Spanish at the University of Oregon. She served as a research fellow at the Oregon Social Learning Center and Center for Research to Practice. Areas of research included the impacts of perceived discrimination on the physical body among Latino Farmworkers, impacts of language brokering on social behaviors of Latino youth, and decision-making habits of youth in foster care.   

Sara attended the University of Portland and completed her Master of Public Health, with an emphasis on health behaviors, and social determinants of health while serving as a graduate research assistant and graduate teaching assistant. Sara completed a year course on global aging, which culminated in a course field study on aging in Nicaragua.

Sara worked in non-profit direct services prior to joining Providence in 2019. She joined Providence with the system Cancer Institute, implementing a decision support application that aids in presenting best practice chemotherapy regimens to practitioners. She joined the Institute for Human Caring in 2021. Her work with John’s Hopkins and Beth Israel Deaconess on sharing access to medical records with care partners was recently published in JAMA.