My main area of research interest is health-services and comparative effectiveness research in ICU outcomes. One major area of focus involves outcomes of patients receiving mechanical ventilation in the hospital. Our goal is to define the epidemiology of this group of critically ill patients over the last 2 decades and see how important hospital outcome measures such as mortality and length of stay have changed. We are looking at disease-specific mortality rates over times to see if there have been improvements for some conditions and not others. Our goal is to be able to identify practice pattern variation based on cause of respiratory failure and see how this variation is associated with outcomes.
Another major research focus is defining the epidemiology of tracheostomy utilization over time among patients receiving mechanical ventilation. We are investigating how outcomes such as mortality, discharge home, and length of stay are associated with timing of tracheostomy in the real world setting. Furthermore, we are attempting to determine what factors influence decisions related to proceeding with early tracheostomy as well as hospital-level variation in early tracheostomy utilization.