Sara Malone’s research is dedicated to ensuring that all children have access to the highest quality of care. She leads a team that designs and evaluates interventions to enhance health care and improve outcomes for children admitted to the hospital, particularly in acute and emergency situations.

A licensed clinical social worker, Malone has worked in a variety of pediatric hospital settings. Her experiences in those settings continues to inform her research, which is aimed at understanding how teams, particularly those within pediatric health-care systems, can best implement and sustain evidence-based programs and practices to improve the delivery of health care. Her research sits at the intersection of implementation science — the study of how to get evidence-based interventions, practices and policies into routine use — and systems science — the study of the properties and interactions of complex systems such as a hospital system. She co-leads the Health Design & Impact Lab at the School of Public Health.

Malone helped develop the Program Sustainability Assessment Tool and the Clinical Sustainability Assessment Tool. The tools are designed to help public health practitioners and clinicians measure the sustainability of public health programs and clinical processes. She also designed CritCom, a tool to measure how teams communicate in the hospital.

Malone teaches classes in systems science and biostatistics, along with chairing the MPH concentration in Epidemiology and Biostatistics.