About

Karly Ann Pippitt attended medical school at the University of Utah and completed her residency in Family Medicine at the same institution, where she served as a chief medical resident. She practices at the Sugar House clinic part time and is involved in teaching medical students at the University of Utah. Her clinical interests include pediatrics, women's health, headaches, and contraception. Dr. Pippitt is known for her caring, knowledgeable, and compassionate approach to patient care, emphasizing patient-centered decision making and personal health goals. She is highly rated by patients for her kindness, communication skills, and dedication to providing thorough and up-to-date medical care.

Research topics

• Medicine
• Psychiatry
• Physical therapy
• Internal medicine
• Surgery
• Social psychology
• Pediatrics
• Medical education
• Mathematics
• Mathematics education
• Psychology

Selected publications

• Using an alumni survey to inform mental and behavioral health curriculum development in a family medicine residency

  2025-09-01

  articleOpen access

  <h3>Context</h3> Patients increasingly seek mental and behavioral healthcare services in primary care. As such, the ACGME requires integrated mental and behavioral health (MBH) training for family medicine residents. Given limited time and training resources, integrating MBH across the curriculum requires prioritization through identifying the most relevant knowledge and skills to cover. Residency alumni have unique and relevant insight into skill gaps in their own practice and in the workforce that may be addressed through enhanced residency training. <h3>Objective</h3> As part of a HRSA-funded project to enhance MBH training for family medicine residents, we surveyed program alumni about their learning experiences and confidence managing MBH conditions. This study describes the results and application of findings from the alumni survey. <h3>Population studied</h3> Family medicine physicians who graduated from one residency program in the United States. <h3>Study design/analysis</h3> Annual cross-sectional electronic surveys. In the first year (April – July 2024), we surveyed a sample of all program alumni up to the class of 2023. <h3>Results</h3> We delivered surveys via email to 124 alumni and 39 responded (31% response). Alumni were most confident managing MBH concerns commonly seen in primary care (e.g., 80% confident managing mood disorders). Alumni were least confident managing schizophrenia and psychotic disorders (8% confident), using non-medication management techniques like brief counseling on relationships (36% confident), and with crisis intervention for psychiatric emergencies (47% confident). For all areas of lower confidence, participants stated that additional training during residency would have helped their confidence. <h3>Conclusions</h3> Family medicine graduates are confident providing a variety of MBH treatments and services, especially for areas already covered during residency training and for common conditions frequently managed in primary care (e.g., mood disorders). Areas where confidence was lower (e.g., schizophrenia, psychosis) are not as common but have serious impacts. Therefore, residency training on these less common yet critical conditions is important in promoting future physician confidence. These areas represent targets for future training and are being implemented into our residency program’s didactic schedule.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Adolescent Medicine

  Primary Care Clinics in Office Practice · 2024-10-23

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Near Naked Vulnerability

  Academic Medicine · 2024-02-08

  articleSenior author

  Students stared as we explained the session—body painting. With perplexed faces, they watched as one of us peeled off a shirt to expose a sports bra and bare abdomen—the ideal canvas to paint a liver. Scheduled at the end of the semester during their ethics and humanities course, this session asks students to paint anatomical structures like organs, blood vessels, bones, and muscles onto the bodies of volunteer models. This allows students to apply their hard-won knowledge from textbooks and cadavers to a living body while practicing the subtleties of touch. We intentionally recruit brave people of all shapes, ages, sizes, and genders as models. As course directors, we volunteer our bodies to be painted. Because we ask students to take risks and challenge themselves in their medical education, we honor that effort by showing our vulnerability. When bodies are exposed to a room full of strangers, the need to acknowledge vulnerabilities is clear. In other aspects of medical training, this exposure is harder to recognize. Through this remarkable act of undressing, we hope to evoke those less visible risks. As they break into small groups to begin, we encourage students to talk with the models while painting and ensure their comfort, just as they do when performing their clinical skills. Enthusiasm for art or anatomical knowledge seems to help overcome the students’ shyness about physical contact. Painting offers a rehearsal to confront the awkward intimacy of touching patients in a medical encounter and an opportunity to practice informed consent for touch. Students are part of the consent process, too, requiring reflection on their own vulnerability as they consider how they will participate or not. Invariably, students question the models about how it feels to be handled while wearing little clothing and showing so much skin. The models’ answers differ depending on the body they are showing and how they understand it to be seen in the world. When these questions are directed to us, as models and course directors simultaneously, there is a subtext: What does it do to your authority when you appear near naked and passive? For us, the answers are simple: We hope you see us as human beings, willing to take risks when it matters. Any authority we hold comes with an obligation to acknowledge and accept the impact of such a delicate interaction. Not that this exercise is easy. We are women raised in a body-conscious culture, socialized to find our imperfections. But in that moment of first pulling off our shirts and beginning the exercise, there is a thrill to being so obviously and authentically vulnerable. Being truly vulnerable requires engagement with real risks, including being wrong, misunderstood, or embarrassed. Because all of these consequences are anathema in medicine, students and faculty often are not willing to engage in activities where risk is high. However, when vulnerability in the classroom is valued, strong responses can lead to new understanding. What is often not acknowledged is that faculty sometimes represent everything that is frustrating or wrong with medical school, or the world. Without a foundation of trust and recognition of faculty as vulnerable humans, course feedback instead targets faculty as surrogates for the system or for content. Faculty need specific guidance and support to navigate the physical and mental toll exacted on their individual human bodies by these critiques, which can be both crushingly personal and painfully unanswerable. While the sticks-and-stones approach works to an extent, we wish that none of us, faculty, student, or staff, should need such a tough hide, especially for a profession that aims to heal and take care of bodies. We want to see the compassion and trust shown so clearly in this body painting session in all of medical education. We ask that educational leaders hold students and faculty accountable to reciprocity of care for each other. Teaching, like medicine, is a creative and imperfect art, advancing through feedback and revision. But, like the nontoxic paint we use, feedback must be applied to an individual body with generosity, intention, and support. We must find the moments in medical education where we all can be models of thoughtful exposure, risking vulnerability and emphasizing our shared humanity—even with our clothes on.

  PublisherDOI

• Evaluation of enhanced mental and behavioral health training for family medicine residents: a research protocol

  BMC Primary Care · 2024-12-21 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access

  BACKGROUND: The treatment gap for mental and behavioral health (MBH) in the United States (US) remains a major public health concern. Given the growing need for a robust MBH workforce, particularly for underserved populations, calls for integrated MBH in primary care have been mounting. Family medicine providers, who know and can treat all members of a family within the same setting, are uniquely positioned to manage MBH conditions. OBJECTIVES: With HRSA funding, the University of Utah Family Medicine Residency (UUFMR) seeks to address gaps in mental health services by enhancing or developing MBH training and partnerships. This protocol describes the project's evaluation. The evaluation aims to identify areas to improve training content, describe training capacity, and assess intermediate outcomes of improved trainings. METHODS: The evaluation consists of three components: analyzing current curriculum and best practices, developing or enhancing trainings with partners, and assessing residents' and graduates' confidence in providing MBH care. RESULTS: The results from this protocol fill gaps in the current literature regarding evaluation methods for provider- and organizational-level outcomes of increased quality and capacity of residency training in MBH. Further, the results provide practical guidance for other residencies seeking to integrate MBH training into their curriculum. CONCLUSION: Considering the resources committed to the ongoing enhancement of resident education, it is crucial to evaluate the implementation and outcomes of improvements to ensure that limited resources are well-utilized. Assessing the training capacity developed through collaboration supports progress toward creating a high-quality, accessible, and integrated mental and behavioral healthcare system in primary care.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Don’t Be Scared of Adolescents

  Primary Care Clinics in Office Practice · 2024-10-23

  articleSenior authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Critical Evaluation of Behavioral Health Curriculum in a Family Medicine Residency Program

  2023-11-01

  articleOpen access

  <h3>Context:</h3> Family Medicine physicians play a crucial role in providing mental health treatment. Given that individuals with mental and behavioral health diagnoses access both primary care and hospital-based services at greater rates than individuals without these diagnoses, it is critical that family medicine residents complete their training fully prepared to treat the mental healthcare needs of underserved populations. <h3>Objective:</h3> This study aims to analyze curriculum to better understand the integration of behavioral health training during the family medicine residency. <h3>Study design and analysis:</h3> To evaluate the existing curriculum, researchers conducted a formative assessment. Using a Delphi technique, we created a 3-point Likert scale that defined inclusion and exclusion criteria for the curriculum to be assessed. Didactics and rotations that were identified as relating to behavioral health were expertly reviewed, focusing on trainings that do not adequately address existing guidelines for behavioral health training in family medicine. <h3>Setting:</h3> A family medicine residency program at a large academic medical institution in the Mountain West. <h3>Outcome measures:</h3> The robust integration of behavioral health training during family medicine residency. <h3>Results:</h3> Behavioral health training exists in the family medicine residency but is scattered across the curriculum (e.g., didactics and rotations). Existing behavioral health curriculum is largely focused on psychiatry and not family medicine. Additionally, the current version of the curriculum focuses on single adult mental health, with gaps in focus on children’s mental health and the role of families. Trainings on critical topics such as suicide prevention and trauma-informed care are present but are not integrated throughout the curriculum. Further, while residents treat vulnerable and underserved groups, the focus has been on medical care without integration of mental and behavioral health. Finally, there are not strong relationships with multiple community partners to tailor trainings to specific patient groups. <h3>Conclusions:</h3> Our findings highlight the need for an integrated and longitudinal behavioral health curriculum with a strong emphasis on community involvement so residents are well prepared to meet the mental and behavioral healthcare needs of their patients.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Patient-Centered Treatment of Chronic Migraine With Medication Overuse

  Neurology · 2022 · 69 citations

  • Medicine
  • Physical therapy
  • Pediatrics

  BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Overuse of symptomatic (i.e., acute) medications is common among those with chronic migraine. It is associated with developing frequent headaches, medication side effects, and reduced quality of life. The optimal treatment strategy for patients who have chronic migraine with medication overuse (CMMO) has long been debated. The study objective was to determine whether migraine preventive therapy without switching or limiting the frequency of the overused medication was noninferior to migraine preventive therapy with switching from the overused medication to an alternative medication that could be used on ≤2 d/wk. METHODS: The Medication Overuse Treatment Strategy (MOTS) trial was an open-label, pragmatic clinical trial, randomizing adult participants 1:1 to migraine preventive medication and (1) switching from the overused medication to an alternative used ≤2 d/wk or (2) continuation of the overused medication with no maximum limit. Participants were enrolled between February 2017 and December 2020 from 34 clinics in the United States, including headache specialty, general neurology, and primary care clinics. The primary outcome was moderate to severe headache day frequency during weeks 9 to 12 and subsequently during weeks 1 to 2 after randomization. RESULTS: = 0.57, 95% CI -0.4 to 0.7). DISCUSSION: When reduction in moderate to severe headache days was used as the outcome of interest for the management of CMMO, migraine preventive medication without switching or limiting symptomatic medication is not inferior to migraine preventive medication with switching to a different symptomatic medication with a maximum limit of 2 treatment days per week. TRIAL REGISTRATION INFORMATION: ClinicalTrials.gov identifier NCT02764320. CLASSIFICATION OF EVIDENCE: This study provides Class III evidence that, for patients who have CMMO, migraine preventive medication without switching or limiting the overused medication is noninferior to migraine preventive medication with switching and limiting symptomatic medication.

  PublisherDOI

• Promotion of a Mastery Orientation to Learning in Medical School: Implementation of the Not Yet Pass Grade

  Academic Medicine · 2022 · 7 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Psychology
  • Medical education
  • Mathematics education

  PROBLEM: Using pass/fail (P/F) course grades may motivate students to perform well enough to earn a passing grade, giving them a false sense of competence and not motivating them to remediate deficiencies. The authors explored whether adding a not yet pass (NYP) grade to a P/F scale would promote students' mastery orientation toward learning. APPROACH: The authors captured student outcomes and data on time and cost of implementing the NYP grade in 2021 at the University of Utah School of Medicine. One cohort of medical students, who had experienced both P/F and P/NYP/F scales in years 1 and 2, completed an adapted Achievement Goal Questionnaire-Revised (AGQ-R) in fall 2021 to measure how well the P/NYP/F grading scale compared with the P/F scale promoted mastery orientation and performance orientation goals. Students who received an NYP grade provided feedback on the NYP process. OUTCOMES: Students reported that the P/NYP/F scale increased their achievement of both mastery and performance orientation goals, with significantly higher ratings for mastery orientation goals than for performance orientation goals on the AGQ-R (response rate = 124/125 [99%], P ≤ .001, effect size = 0.31). Thirty-eight students received 48 NYP grades in 7 courses during 2021, and 3 (2%) failed a subsequent course after receiving an NYP grade. Most NYP students reported the NYP process enabled them to identify and correct a deficiency (32/36 [89%]) and made them feel supported (28/36 [78%]). The process was time intensive (897 hours total for 48 NYP grades), but no extra funding was budgeted. NEXT STEPS: The findings suggest mastery orientation can be increased with an NYP grade. Implementing a P/NYP/F grading scale for years 1 and/or 2 may help students transition to programmatic assessment or no grading later in medical school, which may better prepare graduates for lifelong learning.

  PublisherDOI

• Assessment for Learning with Ungraded and Graded Assessments

  Medical Science Educator · 2022-09-14 · 7 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Determinants of pain interference and headache impact in patients who have chronic migraine with medication overuse: Results from the MOTS trial

  Cephalalgia · 2021 · 15 citations

  • Medicine
  • Physical therapy
  • Psychiatry

  OBJECTIVE: "Pain interference" and "headache impact" refer to negative consequences that pain and headache have on one's life. This study investigated determinants of these negative impacts in a large patient cohort who have chronic migraine with medication overuse. METHODS: Six hundred and eleven adults were enrolled from 34 headache, neurology, and primary care clinics. Negative consequences of chronic migraine with medication overuse were determined using the Patient-Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System (PROMIS) Pain Interference 6b questionnaire and the Headache Impact Test 6. Relationships between PROMIS-6b and Headache Impact Test 6 scores with demographics, headache characteristics, medication use, anxiety symptoms, and depression symptoms were assessed with linear regression. Elastic Net regression was used to develop a multiple regression model. RESULTS: PROMIS-6b T-Scores averaged 65.2 (SD 5.4) and Headache Impact Test 6 scores averaged 65.0 (SD 5.3), indicating severe negative consequences of chronic migraine with medication overuse. Chronic migraine with medication overuse interfered with enjoyment of life, concentration, daily activities, doing tasks away from home, and socializing. Depression symptom severity had the strongest relationship with pain interference and headache impact. Moderate-to-severe headache frequency, headache intensity, and anxiety symptoms were also associated with pain interference and headache impact. CONCLUSIONS: Chronic migraine with medication overuse is associated with substantial negative consequences, the extent of which is most strongly related to depression symptoms.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Kathleen B. Digre

  17 shared

• Todd J. Schwedt

  Mayo Clinic

  12 shared

• Nicole M. Spare

  Thomas Jefferson University Hospital

  12 shared

• Teri Robert

  Patient Advocate Foundation

  12 shared

• Natalia Murinova

  University of Washington

  12 shared

• Vincent T. Martin

  University of Cincinnati Medical Center

  12 shared

• David W. Dodick

  WinnMed

  12 shared

• Marius Birlea

  University of Colorado Denver

  12 shared

Education

• M.D.

  University of Utah

• Other, Family Medicine

  University of Utah