Leah Haverhals

Leah Haverhals
Alumni
Health and Behavioral Sciences

Leah Haverhals’ research interests are largely veteran-centric, specifically focused on aging and disabled veterans’ health issues. As a qualitative methodologist at the Denver VA, her work focuses on topics including improving options for veterans needing long-term care, expanding telehealth options for veterans residing in community nursing homes to have visits with their VA providers, and better understanding the standardization of veterans’ end-of-life decision making and documentation of goals of care conversations in the VA electronic medical record. Her PhD research describes the experiences of those receiving or providing home-based long-term care in VA and non-VA environments in the wake of Hurricane Maria which hit Puerto Rico in September 2017. Leah’s hope is to use findings from this research to inform VA policies around disaster preparedness and improve care coordination for aging and disabled populations during disaster recovery.