What is your background and research interest?
I am a pediatric surgeon and I am interested in ways that we can improve care in routine and common pediatric surgical conditions.

What attracted you to the master’s in Health Services and Outcomes Research (HSOR)?
I was attracted to the HSOR program for a number of reasons. I was looking for a program that I could participate in remotely. The curriculum really fit my goals of learning how to do quality outcomes research. And finally, Northwestern has a great reputation for outcomes research.

What is your independent research project?
We are looking at parental decision making in non-operative treatment of appendicitis.

How is the master’s in HSOR helping you reach your goals?
The HSOR master’s program has given me a great foundation in statistics and different methodologies to be able to perform robust outcomes research.

What stands out about the masters in HSOR?
The flexibility and the effort the program puts into integrating the remote students. I am also blown away by the other students. It is really inspiring to hear their goals and to see their projects mature. Spending time with these young health services and outcomes researchers gets me excited for my own work.

What is your background and research interest?
I am currently completing a research fellowship at the Surgical Outcomes and Quality Improvement Center of Northwestern University between my years of clinical training at the Medical University of South Carolina. My research interests are the implementation of high quality care for early stage lung cancer, the effect of learning collaboratives on improving the quality of surgical care, and identifying strategies to better prepare medical students for general surgery residency.

What attracted you to the master’s in Health Services and Outcomes Research (HSOR)?
This master’s provides a broad overview of HSOR methodology while also providing focused, in-depth support specific to projects I am currently completing. The experiential learning provided is the greatest strength of this program in my opinion.

What is your independent research project?
I have three major projects that the HSOR program has supported. (1) A time-trend analysis of patterns of care for early stage non-small cell lung cancer patients using the National Cancer Database Public Use File. The Methods and Measurement course helped me to identify the dataset to use for my study, the two Quantitative Methods courses and the two Biostatistics courses helped provide the foundation to be able to complete this analysis independently using Stata, and the Writing for Peer Review course helped me refine the manuscript for submission. This work has been presented at national meetings and is currently under review for publication. (2) A cross-sectional observational qualitative study to examine the effect of an external peer mentoring program on organizational quality improvement (QI) ability at hospitals participating in a state-wide surgical QI learning collaborative. I completed 36 pairs of interviews with surgeon mentors and surgeon champion mentees and am currently working to code and analyze this data with the course director for the Qualitative Methods course. (3) A convergent mixed-methods analysis of survey data and interviews to identify predictors of readiness for general surgery residency and to explore resident and faculty perspectives on resident readiness. In addition to the courses mentioned above, the elective course on Survey Design and Methodology is informing this project. This work has been submitted for presentation at a national meeting and I am currently preparing a manuscript for submission.

How is the master’s in HSOR helping you reach your goals?
In addition to the coursework outlined above, the Master’s program has connected me with resources to draw upon throughout the design and execution of all of my research projects. I expect these connections to be life-long relationships for research collaboration.

What stands out about the masters in HSOR?
For me the most impressive aspect of the master’s program is the opportunity for students to use the courses as forums to workshop various aspects of their research projects. By taking advantage of these opportunities, I have been fortunate to be very productive during my research fellowship.

What is your background and research interest?
I am a general surgery resident at Northwestern who has completed three clinical years. My surgical interests are primarily in oncology, with research interests focusing on delivery of health services in complex cancer care.

What attracted you to the master’s in Health Services and Outcomes Research (HSOR)?
Primarily the faculty and the ringing endorsements the program received from previous students. Studying health services is common in my peer group, and everyone I know who had previously completed the master’s program strongly encouraged me to do so as well.

What is your independent research project?
I have a few projects going on simultaneously, but my biggest project involves exploring the relationship between hospital volume and outcomes following complex cancer surgery. The tendency for patients at high-volume centers to do significantly better than those at low-volume centers is well defined in the literature, but coming up with a way to positively affect the relationship has been elusive. My work centers on further defining the association and designing ways to use it in helping hospitals improve care delivery.

How is the master’s in HSOR helping you reach your goals?
Most of the questions I am interested in require big data and rigorous methodology. I think there is a misconception that anyone with a statistics program can get access to a dataset, crunch numbers, and publish. In order for me to address the health services questions I am interested in, I believe I have to be well educated in the statistics and methodological assumptions used in health services and big data, and the HSOR master’s program provides ample training in that area.

What stands out about the masters in HSOR?
The approachability of the faculty. Because the HSOR program is relatively small, every faculty member knows your name and your research interests. Everyone has an open door policy and is happy to help, not only with coursework, but also with your broader research projects.

What is your background and research interest?
I am a pediatric emergency medicine attending at Lurie Children’s Hospital. My research interests revolve around inefficiencies in decision making, cost effective medicine, and ED utilization by different populations.

What attracted you to the master’s in Health Services and Outcomes Research (HSOR)?
I wanted to gain more skills in project design and implementation so I can work toward becoming an independent researcher.

What is your independent research project?
I am looking at the use of orderset and history templates in the electronic health record to facilitate better patient care.

How is the master’s in HSOR helping you reach your goals?
It has helped me to incorporate other forms of data collection into the study for a more robust analysis.

What stands out about the masters in HSOR?
The variety of classes we take gives us exposure to all sorts of health services research. I never thought I would use qualitative or economics research methods in a project, but now I have the skills to incorporate them into future projects.