Staff Biographies

Karen Flynn, DDS, MS, Program Manager 

After graduation from the State University of NY at Buffalo School of Dentistry, Karen Flynn began her clinical career fixing the teeth of Aboriginal and immigrant children at a public dental hospital in Melbourne, Australia. On returning to the United States, she plied the same trade at school and public health clinics in Buffalo, NY, eventually completing fellowship training in "special care dentistry" concurrently with a Master of Science in epidemiology and program planning and evaluation. That final degree led her to an initial exposure to the field of technology assessment as she developed a program to serve the technology information and policy needs of a national consortium of not-for-profit staff- and group-model health maintenance organizations in need of guidance through a period of explosive technology growth and diffusion.

Seeking further challenges and a change of environment, she joined VHA's new technology assessment program while it was part of the Health Services Research and Development Service and which now continues as part of Patient Care Services. 

Elizabeth Adams, RRT, MPH, Health System Specialist 

Elizabeth "Liz" Adams joined the VA in 1987 where she first served as a practitioner, researcher and clinical educator in pulmonary care. After receiving a Master of Public Health from Boston University in 1993, she helped establish the VA Technology Assessment Program that same year. Trained in Cochrane Collaboration(c) Review Methodology, she has produced many health technology assessments for VA including influential evaluations of: diagnostic imaging, rehabilitation of vision disorders following traumatic brain injury, and complementary and alternative therapies for post-traumatic stress disorder, just to name a few. She has served on the Executive Board of the International Network of Agencies for Health Technology Assessment and represents VA at many international fora. Liz continues to promote evidence-based evaluation of health interventions in VA and beyond, and most recently, became a founding member of the HTA Council of the International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research.  Liz graduated from Northeastern University (NU) in 1986 with a Bachelor of Arts in Biology.  In her spare time, she enjoys volunteering with organizations such as AccesSportAmerica and the NU Center for the Study of Sport in Society to promote the value of sport in health and well being and in generating social change.  

Elaine Alligood, MLS, Information Specialist 

Elaine Alligood started her career in health sciences librarianship as an art history undergraduate at the University of Maryland, College Park, when she got a student job at the National Library of Medicine during the summer of 1969. She worked in the Lister Hill Center for Biomedical Communications until 1972 when she graduated and moved on to Library School at the University of Maryland. While at NLM Elaine worked on the AIM TWX experiment that became MEDLINE-now known as PubMED. While in graduate school Elaine worked at the National Cancer Institute's Division of Cancer Treatment, running a small information center for the Cancer Chemotherapy National Service Center.

Elaine worked at the NCI for 4 years, moving to Johns Hopkins' Welch Medical Library in 1976, joining the Veterans Health Administration in 1978 where she served as Chief, Library Service at the Baltimore VA for two years prior to moving to the University of Virginia Health Sciences Library. After 6 years in New York City as Elsevier Science Publisher's Manager for North American EMBASE operations, she moved to Boston to work at Harvard's medical library, winding up at the VA Technology Assessment Program in March 1995. She has been involved in all VATAP projects as an information support, including two influential evaluations of positron emission tomography (PET) scanning.

Elaine has worked closely with members of the International Society for Technology Assessment in Health Care's (ISTAHC) Special Purpose Interest Group for Information Retrieval (SPIG-IR) since 1999. She is currently Chair of the new HTA association, HTAi-Information Resources Group. She is author of the chapter on reference management software in an E-text developed by the SPIG-IR and the National Library of Medicine and is currently working on a project to create a vertical HTA information portal on the HTAi web site. She is also a member of the International Network of Agencies for Health Technology Assessment (INAHTA) committee for internal communications.