Hi Everyone

Much to my surprise and pleasure the funding for my new grant has arrived in 
record time. We now have money for 4 or more positions for three years of 
support described below and are actively starting the recruiting process. If 
you or anyone you know might interested please pass this on.


Hiring up to four PhD post-docs and/or MS trained biostatisticians and/or 
clinical epidemiologists

Immediate hires to work on recently funded NIH RC4 (RFA OD-10-009) titled NEW 
OBSERVATIONAL DATA ANALYSIS METHODS FOR COMPARATIVE EFFECTIVENESS RESEARCH.  
Work will be in the Washington University School of Medicine's Department of 
Medicine's Biostatistical Consulting Center (Dr. Shannon, Center Director and 
RC4 PI) where the statistical methods and data analyses will be performed, and 
the affiliated BJC HealthCare's Center for Healthcare Quality and Effectiveness 
(Dr. Dunagan, Center Director, BJC VP of Quality Improvement, and RC4 
Co-Investigator) where CER expertise and data will be obtained.

Great opportunity for successful candidates to develop independent research 
programs in comparative effectiveness research and statistical methods 
development.

Interested applicants:



MS Candidates:

a)    Please visit https://jobs.wustl.edu for full job posting and application 
information (Job Number 20616) (should be online within 48 hours)



PhD Candidates:

a)    Obtain and review copy of proposal from 
[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>

b)    Submit by mail to William Shannon, PhD c/o Ms. Kathy Kronk to address 
below

a.    Cover letter describing how you see yourself contributing to the 
proposals goal (1 page)

b.    Description of professional goals (1/2 page)

c.    Full CV

d.    Copy of 2 published or in-press papers (required for PhD's, encouraged 
for MS candidates)

e.    Names, titles, phone numbers, and email of three references






ABSTRACT: Comparative effectiveness research (CER) is designed to identify 
healthcare interventions having the best patient outcomes to direct patients to 
receive the best treatment and to direct our healthcare dollars to where they 
will be most productive. When comparing observational data to determine the 
best intervention, CER requires that we apply risk or case-mix adjustment 
methods before examining outcomes of care. For example, to compare survival in 
treatment or hospital for inpatient acute myocardial infarction (AMI) patients 
using the proportion surviving may be misleading if the severity of disease is 
significantly different across interventions or hospital. To make comparisons 
valid, risk adjustment must balance patient factors, such as disease severity 
and co-morbidities, which result in different likelihood of death. A standard 
approach to risk adjustment is to use measures of "observed-to-expected" rates, 
where expected outcome for patients are estimated by an existing, often unknown 
and proprietary, regression model previously fit to a standard or reference 
population of patient data said to be representative of all patients. The 
observed outcome is obtained from the patient's discharge data. The goal of the 
risk adjustment is to determine if an intervention (or provider) on average 
shows better, worse, or the same observed outcomes compared to expected 
outcomes.



We propose to develop and release an open-source HealthCare Rankings (HCR) 
case-mix adjustment software package combining methods from observational data 
analysis, operations research, statistics, and mathematics that have not been 
applied in combination previously in CER and health services research. The HCR 
algorithm ranks two or more interventions or providers simultaneously based on 
direct comparison of patient-level data. This algorithm avoids the need to have 
a reference database for observed-to-expected comparisons. This proposal is a 
joint effort of investigators in the Washington University School of Medicine 
(WUSM) Dept. of Medicine's Biostatistical Consulting Center and the BJC 
HealthCare Center for Clinical Excellence (CCE). There are 11 hospitals in the 
BJC network with a comprehensive informatics system of patient level clinical 
and administrative data available for developing and validating the HCR 
algorithm.

EOE M/F/D/V


Thank you

Bill Shannon, PhD
Associate Prof. of Biostatistics in Medicine
Washington University School of Medicine
660 South Euclid Ave, Box 8005
St. Louis, MO 63110

[email protected]/314-454-8356<http://[email protected]/314-454-8356>


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