Description of Research Expertise

I am a general internist and a health services researcher. My research aims to understand variation in the quality of physician (and other prescribing clinician) services to improve care for aging adults with multiple chronic conditions. To this end, I have examined several domains of physician care quality in primary care: timeliness, effectiveness, patient-centeredness, equity, and efficiency. My research agenda requires complex linkages of survey, Medicare claims, and other secondary datasets, and necessary methodological expertise in rigorous quantitative techniques to estimate causal effects using secondary data. I also have expertise in mixed-methods research including primary data collection via surveys of clinicians and interviews with patients and caregivers.


My ongoing work evaluates the role of physician integration within nursing homes in healthcare utilization and functional outcomes of older adults. Using billing data from Medicare, I developed a rich database of clinical information for a cohort of patients that received post-acute care in skilled nursing facilities between 2012 and 2019. I also developed and tested claims-based measures of physician practice organization, including a widely adopted measure of physician specialization in skilled nursing facility-based practice.