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Welcome to Research Meeting

Date	Title	Presenter
5/1/24	TBD	Allan J. Walkey, MD, MSc, Professor of Medicine, Chief, Division of Health Systems Science, Physician, Division of Pulmonary, Allergy and Critical Care, Department of Medicine, UMass Chan Medical School
4/24/24	TBD	TBD
4/17/24	TBD	Dustin Burns, PhD, GStat, Senior Managing, Scientist, Exponent
4/10/24	TBD	TBD
4/3/24	How David [Elis for Rachael] forced Goliath [Yale] to modernize its mental health policies	Paul Johansen, MA (Yale ’88, also a UMass Med alum), Miriam Kopyto, BA (Yale ’23), Lucy Kim (Yale ’24), Zack Dugue (CalTech ’25), Lily Colby, Esq. (Yale '10).
3/27/24	Probing Research Methodologies and Technology Stacks in Artificial Intelligence for Healthcare Analytics	Vineet Khullar, PhD, Sr. Analyst Cigna Healthcare, Boston, MA
3/20/24	How to model mediation with different types of outcomes	Richard Goldstein, Ph.D., Consultant
3/13/24	Searching for a useful quality measure in TKA surgery	Hua Zheng, PhD, Assistant Professor, Orthopedics Arlene Ash, PhD, Professor, PQHS
3/6/24	Using Health Services Research to Advance Equity	Debbie Peikes, PhD, MPA - Vice President, Measurement & Evaluation Mark Friedberg, MD, MPP - SVP, Performance Measurement & Improvement Deanna Fulp, Sr. Director, Health Equity Programs
2/28/24	Quantifying Regression to the Mean in the PRISM Study	Julie Flahive, MS, Biostatistician, Quantitative Methods Core, UMass Chan Medical School
2/21/24	How Employer-Sponsored Health Insurance Costs are Impacting Earnings Inequality Among US Families	Kurt Hager, PhD, Instructor, PQHS, UMass Chan Medical School
2/14/24	Integrating Wearable Devices into Lifestyle Interventions and Healthcare System Workflows: Closing the Feedback Loop	Garrett Ash, PhD, Assistant Professor of Medicine (General Internal Medicine) Assistant Professor of Biomedical Informatics and Data Science, Yale School of Medicine
2/7/24	A journal review, “Sensitivity Analysis in Observational Research: Introducing the E-Value” by Vanderweele and Ding (2017)	Arlene Ash, PhD, Professor and Jonggyu Baek, PhD, Associate Professor, PQHS, UMass Chan Medical School
1/24/24	Yale’s Biostatistics Webinar: "Measures of Selection Bias for Proportions Estimated from Non-Probability Samples", by Rebecca Andridge of The Ohio State University
1/17/24	Using Synthethic Control Method (SCM) to strengthen causal inference with observational data	Arlene Ash (Division Chief for Biostatistics and Health Services Research) and Jeroan Alison (Chair), in the Department of Population and Quantitative Health Sciences, UMass Chan
1/10/24	Disparities in Palliative Care Use for Patients with Blood Cancer Who Died in the Hospital	Presenter: Tien-Chan Hsieh, MD, Fellow, Hematology Oncology Division, UMass Chan
12/20/23	Characterization and Outcomes of Multiple Myeloma in Puerto Rico	Maira Castaneda-Avila, PhD, Assistant Professor, PQHS, UMass Chan
12/13/23	Can Risk Modeling Research Help Sustain Care Delivery Innovations for People Living Homeless with Chronic Behavioral Health Conditions and Other Barriers to Stability?	John Gilvar, MA, Gilvar Consulting
12/6/23	What is ARPA-H and how might we participate?	Arlene Ash, PhD, Professor, PQHS, UMass Chan Medical School
11/29/23	The maternal health crisis: Can we move the needle?	Sara Teppema, FSA, MAAA, FCA, Chief actuary, Wildflower Health
11/15/23	Evaluation of the Pediatric Palliative Care Network (PPCN) Program	Ying (Elaine) Wang, PhD, Associate Professor, UMass Chan Medical School
11/8/23	Development and Evaluation of the Algorithm CErtaInty Tool (ACE-IT) to Assess Electronic Medical Record and Claims-based Algorithms' Fit for Purpose for Safety Outcomes.	Sonal Singh, MD, MPH, Associate Professor, Family Medicine and Community Health, UMass Chan Medical School
11/1/23	Biomarker Qualification	Jeffrey B Driban, PhD, Professor, PQHS, UMass Chan Medical School
10/25/23	Introduction to the HCSRN Virtual Data Warehouse	Hassan Fouayzi, PhD, Assistant Professor, PQHS, UMass Chan Medical School
10/18/23	Medicare for All - Implications for UMass Memorial and Acute Care Hospitals across Massachusetts	Eric Mick, PhD, Associate Professor, PQHS, UMass Chan Medical School
10/4/23	The rationale and logic of propensity scores	Arlene Ash, PhD, Professor, PQHS, UMass Chan Medical School
9/27/23	The Art of Sample Size Estimation	Bruce A Barton, PhD, Professor, PQHS, UMass Chan Medical School
9/20/23	Missing Data on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity in the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System	Willian Jesdale, Assistant Professor, PQHS, UMass Chan Medical School
9/13/23	Pain and its management in nursing home residents	Kate Lapane, PhD, Professor, PQHS, UMass Chan Medical School
9/6/23	Making Capitated Payments to Primary Care Practices Conform to Expected Differences in Resource Needs	Arlene Ash, PhD and Meagan Sabatino, PhD candidate, PQHS, UMass Chan Medical School
7/25/23	A journal club discussion	Meagan J Sabatino, PhD candidate, PQHS, UMass Chan Medical School
7/18/23	Flexible Services Medically Tailored Meal Evaluation Consortium	Kurt Hager, PhD, Instructor, PQHS, UMass Chan Medical School
7/11/23	Advancing Regularized Regression	JungAe Lee, PhD, Assistant Professor, PQHS, UMass Chan Medical School
6/27/23	Introduction to Multiphase Optimization Strategy (MOST)	Bo Wang, PhD, Professor, PQHS, UMass Chan Medical School
6/20/23	The Fuss about P-Values	Henry Feldman, PhD, Professor, Biostatistics and Research Design, Boston Children's Hospital
6/13/23	Regularized Regression: Ridge, Lasso, Elastic Net, and Beyond	JungAe Lee, PhD, Assistant Professor, PQHS, UMass Chan Medical School
6/6/23	Cervical cancer screening behavior among women in Malawi: with a specific focus on the HPV screening test	Deogwoon Kim, PhD, Postdoctoral researcher, PQHS, UMass Chan Medical School
5/30/23	BioMarkerAI: Combining Statistical and Machine Learning Methods for improving identification of Coding and Noncoding Genes as Putative Biomarkers	Chan Zhou, PhD, Assistant Professor, Biostatistics & Health Services Research, PQHS, UMass Chan Medical School
5/16/23	WebENAR discussion part II: Statistical Issues in Responsible Conduct of Research	WebENAR presenter: Sarah J. Ratcliffe, PhD, University of Virginia School of Medicine; and discussant: Bruce A. Barton, PhD, Professor, PQHS, Director of QMC, UMass Chan Medical School
5/9/23	WebENAR discussion part I: Statistical Issues in Responsible Conduct of Research	WebENAR presenter: Sarah J. Ratcliffe, PhD, University of Virginia School of Medicine; and discussant: Bruce A. Barton, PhD, Professor, PQHS, Director of QMC, UMass Chan Medical School
5/2/23	Mean or Median?	Austin Lee, PhD, Professor, Division of Biostatistics and Health Services Research, PQHS, UMass Chan Medical School
4/25/23	Interpretable, Generalizable, and Fair Predictive Modeling for Long COVID	Feifan Liu, PhD, Assistant Professor, Division of Health Informatics and Implementation Science, PQHS, UMass Chan Medical School
4/11/23	Review of Lloren A et al. (2019)’s disparity model	Jonggyu Baek, PhD, Assistant Professor, Division of Biostatistics and Health Services Research, PQHS, UMass Chan Medical School
4/4/23	Less is More: Why more than half items in the most popular oral health-related quality of life (OHQoL) measure needed to be deleted for more meaningful use?	Chengwu Yang, MD, MS, PhD, Associate Professor, Division of Biostatistics and Health Services Research, PQHS, UMass Chan Medical School
3/28/23	Measuring Age Acceleration in a Pooled Cohort	Sarah Forrester, PhD, MPH, Assistant Professor, Division of Epidemiology, PQHS, UMass Chan Medical School
3/14/23	PCORI funding in total knee replacement (TKR) surgery	Shao-Hsien Liu, PhD, MPH, Assistant Professor, Division of Epidemiology, PQHS, UMass Chan Medical School; Hua Zheng, PhD, Assistant Professor, Orthopedics and Physical Rehabilitation, UMass Chan Medical School
3/7/23	The Commonwealth’s Roadmap for Behavioral Health Reform: Along the Road from Development to Implementation	Christie Hager, JD, MPH, Associate Professor, Division of Biostatistics and Health Services Research, PQHS, UMass Chan Medical School
2/14/23	AGO’s 2022 Cost Trends Report: How Current Approaches to Risk Adjustment May Entrench Barriers to Care and Divert Funds Away from Low Income Communities	Sandra Wolitzky, Deputy Division Chief of the Health Care Division; and Chloe Cable, Assistant Attorney General, Health Care Division, Office of the Attorney General, One Ashburton Place, Boston, MA
2/7/23	Rapid Turn-Around Qualitative Methods	Laël Nethania Ngangmeni, MBS, MD/PhD student (GS2), UMass Chan Medical School
1/24/23	Detection of cognitive impairment in Parkinson’s disease using speech markers: Impact of sex and age on machine learning models	Kara Smith, MD, Associate Professor of Neurology and Neurosurgery, Co-director, Movement Disorders Division, UMass Chan Medical School
1/17/23	Informal discussion of CHIA methods for addressing SDOH factors in policy work, as described in two manuscripts	Research team in the Center for Health Information and Analysis (CHIA)
1/3/23	A Model for Estimating the Financial Impact of “Medicare for All” on Healthcare Systems	Eric Mick, ScD, Associate Professor, PQHS, UMass Chan Medical School
12/20/22	Analyses of Select Sexually Transmitted Infections (STI) in Massachusetts Using the All Payer Claims Database (APCD)	Jeffrey Williams, BS, Biostatician, Quantitative Methods Core, PQHS, UMass Chan Medical School Karen Clements, MPH, ScD, Assistant Professor, PQHS, UMass Chan Medical School
12/13/22	Adaptive Designs in Clinical/Intervention Trial: A Brief Tour of the Recent Developments	Samiran Ghosh, PhD, Professor and Vice Chair, Department of Biostatistics and Data Science, University of Texas School of Public Health
12/6/22	Association of DNA methylation with genetic variation, cardiovascular disease and mortality	Tianxiao Huan, PhD, Staff Scientist, The Population Sciences Branch, National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, National Institutes of Health and with The Framingham Heart Study
11/15/22	Accumulating Evidence for the Value of Food as Medicine	Kurt Hager, PhD
11/1/22	Lessons from an RCT trial of Fitbit at UMass	Bruce A. Barton, PhD, Professor, Division of Biostatistics & Health Services Research, Department of Population and Quantitative Health Sciences; Director, Quantitative Methods Core, UMass Chan Medical School
10/25/22	Extending Our Analysis Comparing Chronic Diseases in the Long-Life Family Study with the Medicare Population	David C. Hoaglin, PhD, Adjunct Professor, Biostatistics & Health Services Research
10/18/22	The CREID: complementary randomized controlled trial and real-world study for efficacy, effectiveness, or implementation design, with illustrations for sequential, parallel, reversed sequential, and iterative designs	Chengwu Yang, MD, MS, PhD, Associate Professor, Biostatistics & Health Services Research
10/11/22	FLnc: Machine Learning Improves the Identification of Novel Long Noncoding RNAs from Stand-alone RNA Sequencing Data	Chan Zhou, PhD, Assistant Professor, Biostatistics & Health Services Research
10/4/22	Huge improvements from simple changes in measuring and predicting success in total knee replacement	Arlene Ash, PhD UMass' FORCE-TJR team
9/27/22	Statistical Tales from the QMC	Bruce A. Barton, PhD
9/13/22	Predicting Race And Ethnicity To Ensure Equitable Algorithms For Health Care Decision Making	Dr. Arlene Ash
Aug 2 to Aug 30	No meetings in August
7/26/22	P4E design	Dr. Mark Friedberg
7/19/22	Interim findings of the 1115 Waiver Demonstration evaluation of MassHealth’s expansion of SUD services	Karen Clements, MPH, ScD, Assistant Professor, PQHS
7/12/22	Reproducible Research with R	Ben Gerber, MD, MPH, Professor and Division Chief, in the Division of Health Informatics and Implementation Science, PQHS
7/5/22	Cancel due to right after July 4th
6/28/22	The Effect of Medicaid Accountable Care Organization on Quality of Care, Outcomes and Disparities for Children With Asthma in Massachusetts	Sarah L. Goff MD, PhD, Associate Professor, Health Promotion and Policy, School of Public Health and Health Sciences, UMass Amherst
6/21/22	Estimation of conditional treatment effect and prediction of binary outcome using the joint use of propensity and prognostic scores	Jonggyu Baek, PhD, Assistant Professor of Biostatistics, PQHS
6/14/22	Focus on Youth in the Caribbean (FOYC): a nationwide implementation of an HIV prevention program in The Bahamas	Elizabeth Schieber, PhD, Postdoctoral research fellow, PQHS
6/7/22	A choice between Gosset and Satterthwaite	Dr. Austin Lee
5/31/22	Equitable Engagement of Family Caregivers in Serious Illness Care	Jennifer Tjia, MD, MSCE, FAAHPM of the Division of Epidemiology
5/24/22	A Novel Machine Learning Algorithm for Creating Risk-adjusted Payment Formulas	Randall P. Ellis, PhD, Professor, Department of Economics, Boston University, Boston MA
5/17/22	Separating racial/ethnic disparities into a within-provider effect and a between-provider effects: an example using the Kitagawa decomposition	Dr. Michael Shwartz
4/26/22	Statistical Methods for Quantitative Intersectionality Research (multilevel analysis of individual heterogeneity and discriminatory accuracy (MAIHDA) model and sequential conditional mean model (SCMM) used in Ariel’s intersectionality dissertation)	Ariel Beccia and Jonggyu Baek
4/19/22	Addressing Disparities in COVID-19 Vaccine Access in Arkansas: Health Equity Strike Teams	Drs. Michelle Smith and Austin Porter
3/22/22	Talk about “Introducing a powerful new research platform, TriNetX, for HER data at UMass”.	Dr. Adrian Zai, Chief Research Informatics Officer, and Ugur Celik, Data Scientist at UMass Chan
3/15/22	Title: Health Equity-Based Quality Scoring Description: I will be summarizing and we will discuss the following article: Agniel et al. (2019). “Incentivizing Excellent Care to At-Risk Groups with a Health Equity Summary Score.”	Meagan Sabatino, PhD student, CPHR, UMass Chan Medical School
3/8/22	Title: Measuring the neighborhood-level effects of structural racism Description: I’ll be discussing a new neighborhood-level structural racism effect index (SREI) we’ve developed as a composite of publicly available data. In this alpha version of the index we’ve included data about housing, transportation, education, wealth, income, social cohesion, the built environment, employment, and criminal justice. We hope the SREI captures broad and interwoven effects of past and current racist policies. The index will assign a score to each census tract in the US and is tested against publicly available outcome data such as average area life expectancy and prevalence of select health outcomes. I’ll also be discussing how it compares to the Area Deprivation Index (ADI) and Neighborhood Stress Score (NSS).	Zachary Dyer, MD/PhD candidate
2/22/22	Title: Subgroup Analysis the FDA Way Description: In a typical clinical trial, with a fixed sample size frequently constrained by budgets, subgroup analyses are usually conducted using interaction terms of treatment-by-subgroup in a regression model of some form. The problem is that the sample size of clinical trials is almost always calculated for the main effect of treatment, not for interaction terms. To test an interaction term with reasonable power, the sample size would need to be at least double the sample size to test the main treatment effect. Thus, it is almost inevitable that the statistical tests of treatment-by-subgroup interactions are non-significant – and, as a consequence, we are missing significant treatment effects (both positive and negative) in diverse subgroups. In addition, because subgroup treatment effects are typically included as secondary outcomes, Family-Wise Error Rates are elevated well beyond the usual 0.05. The FDA realizes this and, in conjunction with ICH and EMA, have proposed new approaches that mitigate both problems. We will discuss the new approach and show what it looks like using the NEJM article (12/31/2020) reporting the results from the clinical trial of the Pfizer vaccine. In addition, as a sidebar discussion, we will discuss how interaction terms work and how we can interpret them with an example from an ongoing analysis.	Dr. Bruce Barton, PQHS
2/15/22	Title: Network analysis applied to evaluate transdisciplinary research teams in public health Description: This talk provides the analysis and the interpretation of network models applied to accessing the transdisciplinary research teams. Using data from the five TREC sites in 2011-2015, we demonstrate the use of social network theory and analysis to provide feedback on team functioning. To understand the effectiveness of team sciences, network summary statistics are presented by investigating dyad and triad census, centrality, brokage score, and visualization. The homophily phenomenon is investigated using exponential random graph model. Overall, the network analysis explains how effectively spread and promote of ideas among collaborators from different disciplines and sites over time. This talk can also be viewed as the overview of social network analysis in public health. The additional applications are introduced in the areas of infectious disease, chronic disease and health behavior.	Dr. JungAe Lee, Assistant Professor, PQHS
2/8/22	The talk is about to review the three main core claims databases from MarketScan: Commercial, Medicare Supplemental, and Multi-State Medicaid. The presentation slide is attached with this forwarded email	Folks from the IBM
1/18/22	Title: Communication strategies for promoting COVID-19 vaccinations: Insights from the scientific literature and rapid response research Description: The team from the UMass Chan Worcester Prevention Research Center will discuss best available evidence regarding effective communication strategies for communicating about COVID-19 vaccinations, with an emphasis on parents and youth. The presentation will cover insights from prior behavioral science and health communication research, findings from a series of community engaged -informed qualitative studies with Worcester youth and parents and how these communication strategies are being integrated into local public health interventions. Time permitting, experiences with rapid response research to inform pressing public health issues will be described.	Dr. Stephenie Lemon, Dr. Grace Ryan (post doc), Melissa Goulding (graduate student), Amy Borg (program director) and Princilla Minkah (research coordinator)
1/11/22	Title: Q&A opportunity for the upcoming ‘PQHS call for proposals to support P-level Grant Development’ Description: The PQHS Advance Science Workgroup is excited to announce the next round of our PQHS Pilot Program (PPP). The PQHS 2019 strategic plan outlined these goals: “secure new P-level grants in the coming years”, “grow internal capacity against select topics”, and “develop capacity to do larger projects through broader community relationships and collaboration”. PQHS faculty have been building internal capacity for research in a variety of areas, e.g., Obesity, Health Disparities, Pharmacoepidemiology, and Tobacco. Capacity building has entailed securing foundational R-level grants in these areas, with partnership from the community and other academic collaborators. Now, PQHS is primed to achieve the culmination of these synergistic goals by pursuing one or more NIH P-level grants. This PPP application will be due on March 20th, 2022. This announcement is for proposals to support NIH P-level grant development. Individual project awards (up to $25,000 for up to 1 year) will be made on a competitive basis. The expectation is that by the funding year’s end, the PI/MPIs will either have submitted an NIH P-level grant or have a very firm timeline for submission. I will present the announcement in more detail and answer the audience’s questions.	Dr. Catarina Kiefe, Chief Scientific Officer and Professor, PQHS
1/4/22	Title: Intelligent Health Monitoring for Machine and Human: From Artificial Intelligence to Realization of Wearable Electronics Description: Personalized health monitoring is a booming sector in the health science domain wherein research is focused on the requirements of patients to monitor critical parameters of the human body from a remote location. This need can be successfully met by wearable electronic sensors and integrated novel artificial intelligence (AI) techniques. Similar intelligent sensing techniques are needed for monitoring machine conditions. A typical example is the quality inspection of flexible or stretchable wearable products in a manufacturing process due to the deformable materials. During the first part of this presentation, I will discuss our work with AI and sensor techniques for health monitoring and machine condition inspection, including fast and accurate image super-resolution, registration, tracking, autofocus, and segmentation algorithms as well as multi-mode sensing, and related fusion algorithms and their broader biomedical applications. During the second part of this presentation, I will discuss ongoing projects to develop deep learning-enabled knowledge discovery for cause-effect diagnosis of human health/machine conditions. Specifically, I will discuss our efforts to develop intelligent sensing and imaging devices, their design, fabrication, and manufacturing processes.	Dr. Xian Du, Assistant Professor, UMass Amherst.
12/21/21	Title: Incorporating intersectionality theory into epidemiology and population health research: Methodological challenges and advances Description: This talk will provide an overview of intersectionality theory and its relevance to epidemiology and population health research, highlight the methodological challenges and theoretical tensions associated with “quantifying” intersectionality, and discuss novel methods that can be used to investigate intersectional health inequities and their determinants.	Ariel Beccia, PhD candidate, PQHS
12/7/21	A paper discussion on recent maternal mortality trends in the US, that I looked for after reading a NY Times opinion piece “What We See in the Shameful Trends on U.S. Maternal Health,” by Sema Sgaier and Jordan Downey sent around in a Society of Actuaries list serve. The sender wrote: “ The article provides a great deal of data broken down into various subsets: What I think comes through, broadly speaking, is how much maternal health is linked to Social Determinants of Health.”	Dr. Arlene Ash
11/30/21	Talk about controlling the Family-Wise Error Rate (a.k.a., alpha error) in any study design involving inference – including RCTs, but other designs as well. He will cover the background of the “usual suspects” – group-sequential designs and fully adaptive designs – and then show how to plan (including sample size) and how to analyze those designs. He will demonstrate an example from his recent work with Sanifit. He will also cover the work of Frank Bretz at Novartis, used by the FDA in their guidance on multiplicity.	Dr. Bruce Barton
11/16/21	“The All of Us Research Program: Opportunities for Researchers”. Dr. Epstein will present a brief background of the All of Us Research Program, a nationwide, NIH-funded initiative to enroll one million or more US residents in a prospective research cohort, with a focus on precision medicine. She will discuss how patients are recruited and enrolled, the types of data that are collected, provide an overview of how researchers can gain access to the data, and what types of analyses that might be possible. She will also talk about the next steps for All of Us (e.g. release of genomic data).	Dr. Mara Epstein, Meyers Health Care Institute, Department of Medicine
11/9/21	“Investigation of false discovery rate in microbiome data for paired samples”. Brief description: Microbiome data that characterize human (or animal) health and disease have been gaining enormous popularity among scientists. While novel statistical research is active in this field, easy access is a method from such as differential expression in genomics. The fundamental difference, however, is that the differential abundance in microbiome means the difference in relative abundances based on taxon counts, needing special attention to the “compositionality.” With such data, controlling false discovery rate (FDR) has proven difficult, we aim to examine the well-known Benjamini and Hochberg (1995) procedure under unreplicated block design. Nonparametric tests are useful to deal with compositional data. For paired samples, the Wilcoxon-signed rank and Quade test are found to be more suitable for the FDR-based inference in microbiome data rather than paired t-test, signed test or Friedman test. To reach this conclusion, the key assumptions of FDR procedure with microbiome data were demonstrated.	JungAe Lee
11/2/21	“Standardizing the coding of SDoH data for research and clinical care at UMass Chan: Can we do it, and if so, how?”	Drs. Adrian Zai and Arlene Ash
10/19/21	A JAMA paper that he was involved in from a pharma company project in sickle cell disease, “The effect of Poloxamer 188 vs. Placebo on Painful Vaso-Occlusive Episodes in Children and Adults With Sickle Cell Disease”.	Bruce Barton
10/5/21	Title: “How can we fix ‘risk adjustment’? ” Abstract: Risk adjustment models that rely on administrative records from health care systems (demographic and enrollment information plus information on diagnoses gleaned from encounter records – and sometimes from prescribed drugs) are widely used to summarize the medical – and sometimes social – risks of individuals cared for by various provider groups and integrated health care delivery systems. The various goals of risk adjustment models include 1) allocating a fixed total budget in a way that pays more to systems that care for more complex patients, 2) setting targets for quality outcomes that recognize existing differences in what can be expected based on patient factors (e.g., hospitalization is more likely for patients with multiple serious diseases), and 3) trying to understand – and control – the apparently inexorable rise in health care spending in Massachusetts and the nation. The important function of “leveling the playing field” is threatened when equally sick patients are made to look sicker within some parts of the system than in others through aggressive “upcoding” of diagnoses. The speaker has spent years pondering how to identify and correct for differential upcoding and hopes to use this research meeting to gather additional ideas and involve others in this work.	Arlene Ash
9/28/21	a discussion about the federal initiative to develop a “National Small-Area Social Determinants of Health Data Platform” in which we will learn about AHRQ’s SDOH (Agency for Healthcare Research for Quality’s social determinants of health) Beta-version, for which they are seeking input as to how useful it is and what they should do to enhance it. Our discussion will follow slides from a recent AHRQ webinar as follows; AHRQ: OS-PCORTF Project “Enhancing Patient-Centered Outcomes Research (PCOR): Creating a National Small-Area Social Determinants of Health Data Platform” Webinar Recording Available Dr. Patricia Keenan and Dr. Jim Kirby recently presented on the project, “Enhancing Patient-Centered Outcomes Research (PCOR): Creating a National Small-Area Social Determinants of Health Data Platform.” This goal of this project is to leverage existing federal data sets and other publicly available data sources to develop a national standardized database of readily linkable SDOH variables. The database will include key information at multiple geographic levels such as income, employment, food, housing, education, health status, and healthcare access and utilization. The project has developed publicly available data files and supporting documentation (e.g., variable codebook). The beta version of the AHRQ SDOH database includes county-level data from 2009 through 2018 and zip code-level data from 2011 through 2018 across five SDOH domains: social context; economic context; education; physical infrastructure; and healthcare context. The data can be used by external researchers to link to other datasets or look across counties and zip codes assessing SDOH-related characteristics. • Download a recording of the webinar here • Access the webinar slides here • Access previous OS-PCORTF webinars here	Jay Himmelstein and Arlene Ash
9/13/21	Title: Simulated impact of transition to Medicare for All at UMMHC; The main aim is to understand the financial impact of transitioning to Medicare for All on the UMass health care system. To model this for UMMHC, we need to set out our assumptions about how “Medicare for All” would be implemented, and what that might mean for the environment in which we would operate. This presentation will present several scenarios under consideration with the express purpose of soliciting feedback and discussion of critical components of the simulation from attendees.	Suzanne Stinson, Arlene Ash, Taylor Larusso, Eric Mick
7/27/21	A discussion about “MassHealth behavioral health in the Year of the Pandemic” – discussing the pivot from massive system reform to pandemic response and then both at once, with an eye towards opportunities for research	Christie Hager, JD, MPH, Managing Director, Public & Private Health Solutions in ForHealth Consulting, and the MassHealth Office of Behavioral Health
7/20/21	A meeting to discuss about "Evaluating Adoption, Impact, and Factors Driving Adoption for TREWS, a Machine Learning-Based Sepsis Alerting System" (link).	Carl Hollins III, Research Associate
7/6/21	A meeting to discuss about "Algorithmic Bias Playbook" (link) the JAMA Internal Medicine sepsis article (about the poor performance of EPIC's algorithm; link).	Drs. Arlene Ash and Adrian Zai
6/21/21	Title: Excess Deaths from COVID-19 and Other Causes During the first ten months of the COVID-19 pandemic, deaths in the U.S. increased by 23% more than expected. However, COVID-19 deaths accounted for only 72% of these excess deaths. Derek Chapman, PhD, and Roy Sabo, PhD will present their team’s research on excess deaths during the COVID-19 pandemic. At the conclusion of this seminar, attendees will be able to (1) explain how social determinants of health may impact COVID-19 mortality; (2) understand methods for estimating excess deaths; (3) describe how excess death rates vary by race/ethnicity and state/region; and (4) discuss potential causes of excess deaths.	Kerek A. Chapman, PhD is the Interim Director of the Center on Society and Health and an Associate Professor in the Division of Epidemiology, Dept. of Family Medicine and Population Health at Virginia Commonwealth University. Roy T. Sabo, PhD, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Biostatistics at Virginia Commonwealth University.
6/1/21	Her work, “Exploring Secure Messaging Content and Associations with Diabetes Physiological Outcomes”. She wants to use this presentation to elicit feedback (analytic methods, ideas for other analyses, etc) at an upcoming AcademyHealth symposium.	Dr. Stephanie Robinson, Research Health Scientist in VA Bedford Healthcare System, Research Assistant Professor, Boston University School of Medicine
5/18/21	A casual (informal) discussion about a research design question regarding how to evaluate a program to deliver medically tailored meals to Medicaid members with chronic diseases (such as diabetes).	Matt Alcusky
4/27/21	Discussion about the Virginia Health Opportunity Index.	Rexford Anson-Dwamena, Senior Epidemiologist/Spatial Analyst (GIS), in Virginia Department of Health
4/20/21	PolicyMap training.	Betsy Minnich
4/13/21	The Medical Care Blog from one of its founding co-editors Jessica Williams, PhD, Assistant Professor of Health Policy and Management at the University of Kansas Medical Center. PQHS Research Coordinator Franny Eanet, MS, will present “A Novice’s Introduction to Blogging” based on her recent experience writing a blog post “Rewarding ACOs that Manage Complex Patients,” and PQHS MD/PhD student Zach Dyer will share his experience writing his award-winning blog post “Want to Be an Antiracist? Expand Medicaid (Or End It).”	Franny Eanet, Jess Williams, Zachary Dyer
4/6/21	Cancelled
3/30/21	Cancelled
3/23/21	“An efficient segmentation algorithm to estimate sleep duration from actigraphy data”. A brief description: sleep duration is a recognized determinant of mental health, obesity, and CVD across the lifespan. Actigraphy is a viable alternative as an objective measure of sleep duration compared to self-reported sleep diary. In the paper, a new efficient algorithm to obtain robust and consistent sleep duration is proposed 1) by identifying temporal segments via pruned dynamic programming and by applying a calling algorithm for sleep evaluation of each identified temporal segment. A new proposed algorithm is also applied in the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis (MESA) and the Early Life Exposure in Mexico to Environmental Toxicants (ELEMENT) study.	Jonggyu Baek
3/16/21	Cancelled
3/9/21	Early effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccination with BNT162b2 mRNA vaccine and ChAdOx1 adenovirus vector vaccine on symptomatic disease, hospitalisations and mortality in older adults in England	Arlene Ash
3/2/21	Cancelled
2/23/21	The knowledge base behind your advocacy legislation guaranteeing primary care for all residents of MA using a global payment	Wayne Altman
2/16/21	Cancelled
2/9/21	Approaches to sample size estimation for complex study designs with multiple primary outcomes. These study designs typically require simulation to determine the sample size and this example from a recent FDA submission provides insight into the process. Future sessions will dig deeper into the details and other aspects of the testing of a new drug.	Bruce Barton
2/2/21	Title: Connecting Randomized Controlled Trials and Real World Studies: Seamless Design and Implementation, with Illustration of a Large Child Abuse Prevention Study Study description: For decades, randomized controlled trials (RCT) have been deemed as the “gold standard” for evaluating the efficacy of interventions. However, due to its inclusion and exclusion criteria, RCTs have well-known limitations of their generalizability to the general population in the real-world setting. As a result, real-world studies (RWS) are gaining increasing interests in recent years, given their abilities of generating more realistic and generalizable results than RCT, or even offering stronger evidence for efficiency of an intervention in a real-world setting. And RWS has been increasingly valued by regulators and payers. Even with conceptual distinctions, RCT and RWS can happily co-exist and complement each other. Here we report our efforts towards this direction, through seamless design and implementation of RCT and RWS in two phases of a large child abuse prevention study, with published articles.	Chengwu Yang
1/26/21	Cancelled
1/19/21	Cancelled
1/12/21	The issue of race/ethnicity imputation given that MassHealth data have 40-50% missingness in one of the consultants on the project from Clark University’s Geography Department. She will share not only the methodology and validation, but also she will share some of the outputs.	Judith Savageau
1/5/21	Cancelled
12/29/20	Cancelled
12/22/20	Predicting adolescent HIV risk behaviors and intervention responsiveness for precision HIV prevention: a deep learning approach	Feiban Liu and Bo Wang
12/15/20	Title: “The Area Deprivation Index (ADI) isn’t what it seems to be.” Brief description: the ADI, a summary score based on 17 census variables measured at the census block group (CBG) or census tract level, is used widely in research, public health planning and resource allocation as an index of neighborhood socio-economic distress. We will explore the surprisingly important role of “technical” choices, such as how/whether included variables are standardized and how CBGs are weighted, on what the ADI actually measures, and contrast it with our (UMass) neighborhood stress score (NSS) developed for use by MassHealth starting in 2016. The ADI and NSS rate some CBGs in Massachusetts at opposite “poles” of distress. We will explore what drives such anomalies and solicit opinions from attendees as to what choices to use as we update the NSS.	Zachary Dyer
12/8/20	Title: Risk adjustment and primary care Learning objectives: 1. Understand what risk adjustment is and the underlying rationale for its range of applications 2. Understand the broad mechanics of how “risk adjustment” is done (using our work with MassHealth as an exemplar) 3. Understand why risk adjustment is important for primary care both as and “enterprise” and for individual PCPs 4. Learn how your coding practices and affect how you or your organization is either paid or judged on quality outcomes	Arlene Ash
12/1/20	Cancelled
11/24/20	Cancelled
11/17/20	“Hospital Admission Quality Measure for Individuals with Diabetes: Importance of Accounting for Morbidity and Social Determinants of Health” The following is a brief description. MassHealth includes a hospital admission quality measure for individuals with diabetes (DM). For fairer comparisons across health plans, it is important to account for the challenges inherent in caring for medically and/or socially high-risk members with diabetes. We estimated increasingly rich models predicting hospital admission for individuals with diabetes using demographics, medical diagnoses and SDH factors as predictors. We compared these models’ predicted rates with actual admission rates for subgroups of interest among 48,172 MassHealth managed care eligible members with DM, ages 18-64, and for the health plans that enroll these members.	Hassan Fouayzi
11/10/20	Cancelled
11/3/20	Cancelled
10/27/20	Benchmarking expectations for interventions to reduce emergency department use among today’s high-users	Edwin Boudreaux
10/20/20	Illustrating variability in ED visit use with the boxplot – a valuable, underused graphical format: "Complex Patients Have More Emergency Visits: Don’t Punish the Systems That Serve Them” that asks the basic question: When holding health plans accountable for patient outcomes, how can we distinguish populations that do better because they were “low risk” to begin with from those receiving better-than-average care? This paper is currently under an invited resubmission review at Medical Care. We enclose the Abstract for context in addition to the figure (link). We will discuss the advantages and limitations of the general boxplot format, as well as the particular design choices made for this figure.	Arlene Ash
10/13/20	Cancelled
10/6/20	Dr. Bryce Bludevich, a General Surgery resident at UMass, will present a on-going research, “Association between the modified Frailty Index and outcomes following Lobectomy”. Description: Using the National Surgical Quality Improvement Program (NSQIP) database we identified patients from 2010-2018 who underwent an elective VATS or open lobectomy for any indication. Using the Charlson Comorbidity Index and the modified Frailty Index (11-point and 5-point) we aim to determine which index best predicts early (within 30 days) post-operative complications. Dr. Bryce Bludevich presents the current on-going research with Dr. Feiran Lou and and Dr. Isabel Emmerick in hopes that they find anyone interested in collaborating the project.	Bryce Bludevich
9/29/20	Public Policy Considerations in Research Design	Robert W. Seifert
9/22/20	Cancelled
9/15/20	Sample integrity in high dimentional data: outliers and missing data analysis	JungAe Lee
9/8/20	Cancelled
9/1/20	Cancelled
8/25/20	Obermeyer et al. (2019), “Dissecting racial bias in an algorithm used to manage the health of populations” to examine and critique the technical modeling they use and present them in our statistical methods meeting. This would be a great opportunity for anyone to learn and discuss about analytic techniques for examining equity and fairness.	Sarah Forrester
8/18/20	“Loss of Community Tenure as a Risk Adjusted Quality Measure”. The following is a short study description. When patients receive services at a hospital, rehabilitation center, mental health facility, nursing home or emergency department, they incur a loss of community tenure (CTloss). We will examine MassHealth members with a diagnosis of bipolar, schizophrenia, and/or psychosis (BSP) disorder in 2017, calculate and model days of CTloss in 2017 (a number between 0 and 365), and describe issues that arise in modeling CTloss for use as a risk adjusted quality measure in the BSP population.	Nienchen Li
8/11/20	An introductory talk about our modeling work for MassHealth (both to predict payment and to produce risk adjusted quality measures) – the kinds of things that we do and don’t worry about, and how we test models to see whether they are “good enough	Arlene Ash
8/4/20	A statistical issue about building a multilevel model of resident and facility factors related to developing suicidal ideation among nursing home residents. One of the main challenges that her team has been encountering is the issue of ideation being a relatively rare outcome.	Christine Ulbricht
7/28/20	Cancelled
7/21/20	“Adolescent HIV-related behavioral prediction using machine learning: a potential foundation for precision HIV prevention”. Dr. Bo is the first author, and Dr. Liu and Dr Ash are co-authors. The following is a brief summary. Precision prevention is increasingly important in HIV prevention research to move beyond universal interventions to those tailored for high-risk individuals. The current study aims to develop machine learning approaches for predicting adolescent HIV risk behaviors (multiple sex partner and ever had sex) and understanding behavioral, social and environmental determinants of those risk behaviors. We used a comprehensive longitudinal dataset from a HIV intervention study on 2564 grade-10 students in the Bahamas. We explored four classic machine learning algorithms; random forests and support vector machines achieved best performance on predicting ever had sex and multiple sex partner respectively, yielding AUC scores of 0.87-0.89 on unseen testing data. Cost-sensitive learning helped to combat the data imbalance issue for multi sex partner. Important predictors were also identified for both target risk behaviors. This exploratory research holds great potential for implementing targeted intervention strategies towards precision HIV prevention.	Feifan Liu
7/14/20	Cancelled
7/7/20	Cancelled
6/30/20	Cancelled
6/23/20	Cancelled
6/16/20	Cancelled
6/9/20	Cancelled
6/2/20	Title: High-frequency hospital users: the tail that wags the dog? Description: To describe the characteristics of high-frequency hospital users (with 4 or more hospitalizations in a year) and the consequences of including or excluding their data from 30-day readmission measure	Hassan Fouayzi
5/26/20	Cancelled	Hannah Lin
5/19/20	“Factors Associated with 90-day Mortality in Patient Undergoing Thrombectomy for Acute Ischemic Stroke”, to investigate baseline clinical and procedural factors associated with 90-day mortality in patients undergoing mechanical thrombectomy for emergent treatment of acute ischemic stroke. Findings may distinguish patients who may not benefit from endovascular intervention, help clinicians evaluate post-thrombectomy prognosis, and identify potential areas to improve upon mortality and complication rates in the modern era of mechanical thrombectomy. For more details, see the attached.
5/12/20	Cancelled
5/5/20	Cancelled
4/28/20	The COPE- Clinical Manifestations Study (COPE-ECM) and solicit practical and conceptual advice regarding how to identify the study sample. The COPE- ECM study will recruit 600 individuals who have undergone SARS-COV2 (COVID-19) testing at UMMHC facilities: 300 COVID+ and 300 COVID-. These individuals will be interviewed by phone following a Computer-Assisted Telephone Interview (CATI) protocol and be compared for clinical presentation as well as clinical outcomes between the two groups. The goals are to: 1) Identify possibly novel symptoms that suggest a differential diagnosis of COVID vs. other disease processes with overlapping symptomatology. 2) Develop a predictive tool to distinguish between people most and least likely to test positive based on just symptoms and other patient characteristics. 3) Compare the subsequent clinical trajectories of COVID-tested patients: a. Between COVID+ and COVID- patients. b. Among COVID+ patients, explore differences in the clinical course based on early symptoms and other characteristics. The EPIC COVID registry will be used to identify and COVID+ and COVID- patients in this diverse cohort will be surveyed, so as to be able to explore these data for evidence of racial/ethnic and socioeconomic differences. Interviewers (both English-speaking and Spanish-speaking) will use pre-populated CATI scripts with patient-specific data from the EMR.	Arlene Ash
4/21/20	Cancelled
4/14/20	Cancelled
4/7/20	Cancelled
3/31/20	“Machine Learning-based Outcome Prediction & Hypotheses Generation for Substance Use Disorder Treatment” to get valuable feedback from UMass Chan colleagues to improve the paper before it goes to the targeted journal and 2) to find new UMass Chan colleagues who might be interested in doing research with Dr. Oztekin in healthcare analytics, medical informatics, clinical decision support using machine learning, data mining, etc.	Asil Oztekin's team
3/24/20	Cancelled
3/17/20	A discussion about the attached paper (Austin 2011), “An Introduction to Propensity Score Methods for Reducing the Effects of Confounding in Observational Studies”. The paper describes four different types of propensity score methods at the introductory level: 1) matching, 2) stratification, 3) weighting, and 4) covariate adjustment.	Arlene Ash
3/10/20	Cancelled
3/3/20	Cancelled
2/25/20	A discussion about an attached paper (Kolak et al., 2020), “Quantification of Neighborhood-Level Social Determinants of Health in the Continental United States”. Briefly, the authors in this article suggest a new set of social determinants of health measures. It goes beyond single index measures to create 4 separate indices, measuring different types of social determinants, all at the census tract level. This approach gives more information about factors that might be driving health outcomes in a particular area. It would be a useful approach for policy studies and may have other applications in observational research.	Robin Clark
2/18/20	Cancelled
2/11/20	“Stratified randomization: what, why, and how”.	Bruce Barton
2/4/20	Cancelled
1/28/20	Introductory propensity Score methods	Arlene Ash
1/21/20	Sample size and power calculation by simulation	Bruce Barton
1/14/20	Cancelled
11/26/19	A literature review and the paper by Obermeyer et al. (2019) “Dissecting racial bias in an algorithm used to manage the health of populations”	Matthew Alcusky
11/19/19	Cancelled
11/12/19	A literature review Downs et al (2010) ,“Vulnerability-Based Spatial Sampling Stratification for the National Children’s Study, Worcester County, Massachusetts: Capturing Health-Relevant Environmental and Sociodemographic Variability.	Hassan Fouayzi
11/5/19	No meeting
10/29/19	No meeting
10/22/19	Geocoding in SAS and R	Jonggyu Baek
10/15/19	Cancelled
10/8/19	Neighborhood-level risk factors: Childhood opportunity index (COI) Reading: The Child Opportunity Index: Improving Collaboration Between Community Development And Public Health	Eric Mick
10/1/19	Q: to caculate patent costs in a step wedge design implemented in Ed Boudreaux’s System of Safety (SOS) study	Karen Clements