Duke Leadership Academy Scholars Profile

Kristen Said

Title: Assistant Director, EOHW
Location:
Senior Management Area: Family MEducation and Community Health
Class Year: 2024

Bio:
Dr. Kristen Said has been the Assistant Director for Duke Employee Occupational Health and Wellness (EOHW) since 2021. She has been an Assistant Professor in the Division of Occupational and Environmental Medicine in the Department of Family Medicine and Community Health since 2017. Additionally, she serves as the Assistant Program Director for Duke's Occupational and Environmental Medicine residency program. In her capacity as Assistant Director for EOHW, Dr. Said assists in managing programs aimed at employee occupational injury and illness prevention and treatment, fitness for duty concerns, occupational reproductive health evaluations, international travel medicine, occupational surveillance programs, infectious disease prevention and surveillance, applicant health reviews at onboarding, FMLA, ADA reasonable accommodation medical reviews, compliance with state, federal, and regulatory requirements, and more. In 2020, Dr. Said co-lead the EOHW response to COVID prevention in the workplace among Duke's then 42,000 employees from the University and Health System across the world. Dr. Said demonstrated her skills drafting and continuously updating policies and algorithms in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, resulting in Duke being a gold standard for respiratory pandemic response. From 2022-2023 Dr. Said lead the EOHW Placement Health review Rapid Improvement Event for the Health System, which resulted in creating a system-wide standard for documenting Health Screenings, automating part of the internal transfer review process, improving and standardizing candidate communications for Health Screenings, integrating Health Screening information from Agility (EOHW's EMR) into SuccessFactors, allowing Talent Acquisition coordinators to schedule applicants directly into Agility while keeping all personal health information confidential. These actions reduced the time for required for an applicant to complete the Health Screening process by 6 days, allowing them to be onboarded sooner. Dr. Said continues to look for innovative ways to better and more efficiently serve the health, wellness, and safety needs of all Duke employees.