Emily A. Ekl is the recipient of the 2022 Louise Johnson Scholar Award from the American Sociological Association section on Medical Sociology. The award honors a graduate student’s overall academic merit and the quality of a paper that advances the field of medical sociology. The award committee praised her contributions in their announcement:
“Emily A. Ekl (Indiana University at Bloomington) is the recipient of the 2022 Louise Johnson Scholar Award. Her research focuses on the ways that health policy and organizational factors affect the practice of health care, patient experiences, and patient-provider relationships. Her work is pioneering because it merges health services research, health policy (institutional and national) analysis, patient-provider communication research. and the sociology of health professions. Building on sociology of standardization and organization theories, her dissertation examines the unintended consequences of regulatory policies for speech language pathologists. Her work demonstrates how policies driven by the logic of rationality and efficiency may jeopardize patient-provider relationships and hurt the quality of health care. In her specific article (under review): "Examining Drivers of the Evidence-Based Practice Movement among Allied Health Professional," she examines the role of evidenced-based practice (EBP) as a form of standardization in medical practice. Drawing on ethnographic data, her paper demonstrates that under certain conditions the institutional logic of EBP becomes decoupled from medical practice and threatens the quality of care. Her work is poised to make significant contributions to the sociology of health, medicine, and profession.”
Congratulations, Emily!
The College of Arts