Health-care Applications
Description
Active postmarketing drug surveillance. There is substantial interest within the U.S. health community and among health policymakers in developing a surveillance system that scans public health databases in order to proactively detect potential drug safety issues. Existing methods for such surveillance have limitations. Namely, they do not account for the dynamic relationships between multiple adverse events. Professor Goh has developed a new surveillance method that circumvents this limitation by capturing the dependence of adverse events. This method has shown promising results in preliminary tests on simulated data and is being validated using patient data from Medicare.
Assessing the human and economic costs of workplace stressors. While there is widespread consensus that a variety of workplace stressors have negative health consequences, studies to date have focused on individual stressors because of the technical and logistical challenges in investigating the aggregate health effects of workplace stress. To address this problem, Professor Goh has developed a model that relates 10 commonly studied stressors (including long hours, lack of control, and work-family conflict) to four commonly measured health outcomes. The analysis suggests that workplace stressors have a substantial impact on mortality and health care spending in the United States.
Comparing the cost-effectiveness of screening strategies for colorectal cancer. Colorectal cancer is a leading cause of cancer-related deaths in the United States, but it is largely preventable through early screening and intervention. Colonoscopy, the prevalent screening method, is highly effective but also expensive. A new method, fecal immunochemical testing (FIT), is cheaper but less accurate. Moreover, because FIT has not yet been widely adopted and tested, evidence of its efficacy is limited and exhibits large variability. Because existing methods for cost-effectiveness analyses do not fully account for the effect of uncertainty, policymakers are unable to rigorously assess the cost-effectiveness of FIT. In response to this issue, Professor Goh has developed a model for cost-effectiveness analysis that fully accounts for the inherent uncertainty of the analyses. The analysis rigorously identifies worst-case scenarios, and it shows that even in these cases, outcomes using FIT would be comparable to those using colonoscopy, but at a much lower cost.