Karen Salomon-Escoto

Karen Salomon-Escoto, MD, is a clinician-researcher Associate Professor in the Department of Medicine, Division of Rheumatology at UMass Chan Medical School in Worcester, Massachusetts. She is board-certified in Rheumatology.

She earned her medical degree at Universidad Nacional Pedro H. Ureña, in Santo Domingo, Dom. Rep. She graduated Magna Cum Laude and was awarded the Dominican University Foundation Award for having the highest rank of all Health Sciences graduates in 2001. She did an Internal Medicine internship in Graduate Hospital (Drexel University), in Philadelphia, then moved to Massachusetts where she completed Internal Medicine Residency and Rheumatology Fellowship in UMass Medical School.

In 2008 she joined the UMass Rheumatology Division and pursued training in musculoskeletal ultrasound, a novel field in her specialty at the time. She competed nationally for the first USSONAR Train-the-Trainer program, and became the founding director of the Rheumatology Musculoskeletal Ultrasound Clinic. She provides diagnostic and interventional ultrasound services to the Division, while also training fellows in these skills. Dr. Salomon-Escoto has devoted her career to patient care and has an impeccable reputation among colleagues and patients. In 2010 she was awarded the UMass Department of Medicine Recognition Award, for her dedication to clinical care, education, and research.

Her interest in inflammatory arthritis catalyzed her research efforts. She has collaborated nationally and internationally with senior researchers in inflammatory arthritis, focusing on quantitative assessment of disease.

Dr. Salomon-Escoto also collaborated with NIH AMP (Accelerated Medicines Partnerships) investigators and performed ultrasound-guided synovial biopsies, for studies aimed at further understanding genetic and cellular signals that will provide new insights into the pathogenesis of rheumatoid arthritis.

She is an active investigator in the UMass Rheumatology Clinical Trials Program and is the site PI of an international multicenter study focused on developing a sonographic scoring system for enthesitis in psoriatic arthritis (GRAPPA DUET Study).

More recently Dr. Salomon-Escoto has been invested in electronic health record (Epic) optimization for Rheumatology, including automation of disease activity tracking, and harnessing AI to streamline workflows, particularly aimed at simplifying documentation while optimizing patient care. Her expertise positions her to be a true Epic “super user” relevant to clinical functionalities but also data extraction.