Kathleen E. McKee, MD

Kathleen McKee, MD, MPH is the division director of Movement Disorders at Intermountain Health. She leads the movement disorders clinical and research teams toward the same goal of helping people with movement disorders live the healthiest lives possible.  Dr. McKee graduated with honors in English from Harvard College and received her degree in Medicine from Emory University in Atlanta.  She completed her neurology residency and movement disorders fellowship at Mass General Brigham along with a second fellowship in health policy and hospital management with the Mass General Physicians Organization.  She holds a Master in Public Health degree from the Harvard School of Public Health.  

Funded by generous philanthropic gifts, Dr. McKee leads Parkinson’s Elevated: an initiative to create a proactive value-based model of Parkinson’s care that will focus on comprehensive health maintenance.  People with Parkinson’s often struggle to get diagnosed, find high quality care, and to coordinate their care between different subspecialists. Many specialists are often involved because Parkinson’s affects every organ system in the body.  The Parkinson’s Elevated program is designed to provide all encompassing care for people with Parkinson’s centered around the patient and their family.  To-date the program includes a Parkinson’s primary care physician located at the Intermountain Medical Center Movement Disorders Center.  This physician sees only people with Parkinson’s and their family members. Parkinson’s Elevated is being built to bring the first several steps of subspecialist care into the same clinic, thus eliminating the coordination patients often have to do between multiple different physicians and locations.  Parkinson’s Elevated will also include differing clinical interventions based on disease state. For people in early to middle stage Parkinson’s the program will include high-intensity aerobic exercise.  To-date aerobic exercise is the only treatment with evidence that it might slow down Parkinson’s Disease.  This article authored by Dr. McKee and her colleagues explains the evidence behind exercise for Parkinson’s and provides specific recommendations for an exercise program.  In addition to her own research Dr. McKee serves as site investigator in several multi-center Parkinson’s clinical trials including SPARX3, PDGENEration, GEARS, and BIAL-ACTIVATE.

My Bibliography - NCBI

Dr. McKee is the Intermountain Principal Investigator on the SPARX3 study.