Research Program

My overall research is centered in the areas of pharmacoepidemiology and optimal therapeutic strategies in the treatment and prevention, especially for cardiovascular disease (CVD) to improve the quality of care for patients, particularly in the elderly who have considerably higher risk for CVD, multiple comorbidites, needs for multiple treatments, and in the mean time higher risk of adverse side effects from treatments.There is a marked lack of clinical evidence for treatment selection for elderly patients and elderly patients with multiple comorbidties were rarely represented sufficiently in randomized clinical trials.

My long-term research goal is to evaluate real-world treatment effects (effectiveness and safety) and outcomes of different treatment options to provide evidence to support clinical and healthcare policy decision that will improve the quality of care and minimize risk of harm for patients.

My current research includes several areas such as treatment utilization assessment, advanced analytical methods, and optimal treatment strategies. In the assessment of treatment utilization, my research focuses on particularly variations in the use of various treatments in the real world clinical practice. I am a research fellow of the UNC Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Service Research. My research in methodology focuses on developing and validating advanced analytical methods in reducing confounding, especially confounding by indication and the interpretation of treatment effects estimates from different analytical methods under treatment effect heterogeneity using real-world healthcare utilization database. My research in optimal treatment strategies primarily focuses on CVD and key risk factors such as hypertension and diabetes.

I term my research program as ETrUOP — Evaluating Treatment Utilization and Outcomes in Populations. You can visit the ETrUOP research program website for more information.

Research Collaboration

The nature of investigating real-world treatment utilization and outcomes requires a multi-disciplinary approach since decision and choice for the use of a particular treatment are often multifactorial including clinical & prognostic factors, economic factors, insurance, access to care, treatment preference and many other. My research has a strong collaboration with other top researchers at UNC Chapel Hill such as pharmacoepidemiolgoic methodologists and biostatisticians in the Pharmacoepidemiology Program in the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health, health service researchers in the UNC Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Service Research, and clinicians in the UNC School of Medicine.