Raina Merchant

Dr. Raina M. Merchant is a specialist in Digital Health. Raina is an Associate Vice President at Penn Medicine and Professor, Department of Emergency Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. She has secondary appointments in the Department of Internal Medicine and the Department of Anesthesia and Critical Care. She is the Director of the Penn Medicine Center for Digital Health and Co-Director of the Penn National Clinician Scholars Program. She is a member of the editorial board of JAMA.

Raina attended Yale University for her undergraduate degree, the University of Chicago for Medical School, and the University of Pennsylvania for a Masters of Science in Health Policy Research and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholars Program. Her research is at the intersection of digital media and health. She has specifically conducted projects evaluating health behaviors and communication on digital platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, Instagram, and Google. One of her projects in this area involves "banking language" through the development of a unique longitudinal database of social media data merged with health record data. She is currently funded by the NIH and has over 100 peer-reviewed publications in journals such as NEJM, JAMA, Circulation, and Health Affairs. Her work has been featured in Wired, the Economist, the Wall Street Journal and others. She is an Aspen Health Innovators Fellow and was recognized by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation as one of 10 young investigators likely to have a significant impact on the future of health and healthcare in the US.