Research Abstract

My research topics in health care policy center on measurement of the

quality of care provided by health plans through consumer assessments and

clinical and administrative data. I am also interested in racial/ethnic

and socioeconomic disparities in quality of care. I am an investigator

on a project in collaboration with the California Cancer Registry and

regional registries that examines quality of care for colorectal cancer

using registry data, patient surveys, and a physician follow-back survey.

In this project we have developed new statistical methodology for correcting

treatment data in Registry records for underreporting. I am currently an

investigator in the NCI-funded CanCORS (Cancer Consortium for Outcomes

Research and Surveillance) study, both as part of the Statistical

Coordinating Center (based at DFCI) and through a research site that is a

collaboration of Harvard Medical School and the Northern California cancer

registries.

To these projects I bring my experience as a lead statistical investigator

in the core development project of the Consumer Assessments of Health

Plans Study (CAHPS), the CAHPS implementation for Medicare managed care,

and an AHRQ-funded project on expansion of the HEDIS clinical quality

measures. My statistical research interests include surveys, census

methodology, small area estimation, official statistics, missing data,

hierarchical modeling, and Bayesian methodology.