Designing and Analyzing Medical Studies and Policies that Devolve from Them
Research in the Department of Health Research and Policy involves designing medical studies, from randomized, double-blinded, controlled clinical trials, to deciding which data to gather regarding populations that may be at risk for disease, to studying data gathered from large databases such as from the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and related. Once data are gathered there remain difficult problems regarding analyses of them and implications for policy. Faculty and staff of the Department, collectively, have expertise at all such matters. They have made path-breaking contributions to such subtle matters as balanced coin designs, assessment of treatments of lymphomas, making prognoses for individuals who have undergone organ transplantation, and infectious disease epidemiology. Faculty include the inventors and co-inventors of the celebrated bootstrap technique for statistical inference and of CARTR methodology for pattern recognition, as well as of many new approaches to archiving and mining data, to imputation, and to analyses of data by wavelets. They are at the cutting edge of methodology for understanding developmental biology and genetics: population genetics, tissue banking, expression data gathered from microarrays, and related problems concerning the impacts of genetic polymorphisms (SNPs) and circulating proteins upon complex disease. Particular diseases of interest include breast, ovarian, and prostate cancer, lymphomas, Parkinson's disease, dementias, hypertension, rheumatoid arthritis, kidney disease, and cardiovascular disease.
Members participate in all new School of Medicine centers and research initiatives. They have made important contributions to: assessing both outcomes and the cost-effectiveness of managed care; preventing chronic disease; methodologies for laboratory testing and imaging, such as MRI; such interventions as bone marrow transplantation, angioplasty, coronary artery bypass surgery, and t-PA for acute myocardial infarction. Research described here involves the adaptation of modern, high-speed, computation to specific purposes, for example, to understanding cis-regulatory mechanisms. We are always sensitive to matters of patient privacy and concerns that devolve from HIPAA regulations. Members of the department collaborate with others in all departments and divisions of Stanford's School of Medicine, as well as with colleagues in Humanities and Sciences and other Stanford schools and the Kaiser Division of Research in Oakland. They participate in cancer outreach to the larger community.
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