This blog post submitted by: Nrupen Bhavsar, PhD, Assistant Professor of Medicine, Duke General Internal Medicine.
AcademyHealth’s Annual Research Meeting brings together researchers and clinicians interested in health services research. The meeting was held in Boston and over 2000 people attended. Despite the size of the meeting, you can always spot a familiar face in the crowd. This year was no different as many of our DGIM colleagues attended the meeting, including Jeffrey Clough, David Edelman, Brad Hammill, Matthew Maciejewski, Courtney Van Houtven, and Virginia Wang.
Sessions focus on leveraging big data
The topics at the meeting vary considerably but many of the sessions this year focused on leveraging big data for research, statistical methods to do it correctly, and how results can be applied to health policy. There was also a strong interest in reducing health disparities, as highlighted through the first plenary session and a separate session on advancing health disparities methods. I appreciate that the conference has a strong focus on methods as it’s an important component of my work.
Presentation about care delivery in palliative medicine
Along those lines, the work I presented this year focused on leveraging methods from operations research to understand the components of palliative care delivery. By conducting a time and motion study to record the tasks clinical and administrative staff perform in the delivery of palliative care, we were able to quantify how much time the staff spend on individual clinical and administrative tasks. We also used this information to visualize the process of delivering palliative care by creating a process map.
Next year – New Orleans!
It was great to see the exciting work being conducted within HSR within and outside of Duke. I was able to take a small amount time to enjoy the gorgeous weather outside. I am looking forward to the meeting next year which will be held in New Orleans, a city I lived in and have been back to many times.
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Learn more about Dr. Bhavsar from this Spotlight.