Our Assets: Saint Luke’s Health System
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Technical Expertise
Suzanne Arnold, MD, MHA
Dr. Arnold is a Board Certified cardiologist devoting 30% of her time to clinical cardiology practice and 70% to outcomes research at MAHI. She received her MD and MHA degrees from The Ohio State University and completed her internal medicine residency and clinical cardiology fellowship at Washington University in St. Louis. She spent 3 years during her cardiology training doing outcomes research at MAHI through the AHA-PRT Award. She is a Clinical Associate at the UMKC School of Medicine. Dr. Arnold has produced numerous scientific contributions in the field of patients’ health status recovery after acute myocardial infarction and Trans-Aortic Valve Replacement (TAVR) and is a leader developing risk models for patients’ health status outcomes. She recently received a fundable score for creating shared decision-making tools to assist patients and providers considering TAVR interventions, based upon patients’ predicted survival and quality of life after treatment.
Paul Chan, MD, MSc
Dr. Chan is a Board Certified cardiologist devoting 25% of his time to clinical cardiology practice and 75% to outcomes research at MAHI through an NIH training grant. He received his MD degree from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, his internal medicine and pediatrics residencies at the Brigham and Women’s and the Boston Children’s Hospitals, and his cardiology fellowship and masters in biostatistics & clinical research design at the University of Michigan Schools of Medicine and Public Health. He is an Associate Professor of medicine at the UMKC School of Medicine.
Dr, Chan is an international authority on the management and outcomes of in-hospital cardiac arrest. He is widely published in the field, including landmark papers in the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, Lancet and Circulation. In 2013, he received the AHA’s Resuscitation Council’s highest recognition award for the field, the Dickinson W. Richards Memorial Lectureship. Currently, Dr. Chan is a member of the AHA’s Scientific Writing Group on Out-of-Hospital Cardiac Arrests and BLS Guidelines and the American College of Cardiology (ACC) Writing Group on Performance Measurement. He is also co-director of the Adult Task Force for the AHA’s National Registry for Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation. In 2013, he received the AHA’s Resuscitation Council’s highest recognition award for the field, the Dickinson W. Richards Memorial Lectureship. His research interests include the appropriate use of technology in a manner that is cost-efficient and which optimizes patient outcomes, improves quality, and reduces disparities. He has numerous peer-reviewed publications.
Adnan Chhatriwalla, MD
Dr. Chhatriwalla is an interventional cardiologist with a focus on structural heart disease, patient outcomes and shared medical decision-making. He devotes 20% of his time to research and is the Co-PI of a grant from the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) to develop a shared decision-making tool for bare metal vs. drug eluting stents in patients undergoing percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI). He led the implementation efforts, from a physician’s perspective, of the ePRISM tool to deliver personalized medicine in the cath lab to improve the safety and outcomes of PCI.
Kensey Gosch, MS
Kensey Gosch serves as a biostatistician for the CV Outcomes Research. She supports numerous investigators analyzing data housed at MAHI and has published over 30 papers on cardiovascular outcomes. Her expertise includes hierarchical modeling, multiple imputation and propensity score methods. She continuously seeks to apply the most appropriate techniques, and has researched and introduced several contemporary methodologies to the Biostatistics group, including alternative regression models for estimating relative risk and shared frailty models for clustered time-to-event data. She is also highly skilled in data management and has developed several Access databases for local researchers. She has substantial experience using both SAS and R for data analyses.
Phil Jones, MS
Mr. Jones is the Senior Biostatistician for the Outcomes Group and manages the statistics and programming group for CV Outcomes Research at MAHI. In addition, he serves as the primary statistical liaison for Saint Luke’s Health System and for the Cardiovascular Outcomes Research Consortium, an international network of cardiovascular outcomes researchers. Mr. Jones has co-authored over 60 published clinical articles and has served as lead statistician on numerous grants and industry-funded studies. Mr. Jones has as Master’s degree from Iowa State University and over 12 years of experience in biostatistics and project leadership. His major statistical interests are in risk-adjustment, hierarchical data analysis, latent variable models and selection bias. He also has substantial experience with provider profiling methods, having developed internal models for physician performance reports and working closely with Saint Luke’s Health System leadership to improve hospital performance metrics using Bayesian methods.
In addition, Mr. Jones has extensive data management experience, including over 10 years experience with SAS and SQL, creation of several complex Access database applications, co-development of a conceptual model for a hierarchical patient-centric data warehouse, creation and direction of the Research Center’s analytic data repository, and authorship of internal standards for data organization and representation. He is conversant with several other software packages and languages, including R, WinBugs and Visual Basic. He is a highly skilled programmer, and has developed and maintains a large repository of macros for facilitating complex statistical analyses and for providing rapid, accurate and concise deliverables for customers.
Kevin Kennedy, MS
Mr. Kennedy is a masters-level statistician from Kansas State University who was been an instrumental part of the MAHI research department since 2008. He is the lead analysis for several of the ACC NCDR datasets, including the Cath/PCI, ACTION, ICD and CARE registries. He is an expert in the creation of risk-prediction models for quality assessment purposes. He supports numerous investigators throughout the country and has published over 50 peer-reviewed manuscripts. Mr. Kennedy also has extensive expertise linking clinical registry data, such as the NCDR, with large administrative claims data, such as the CMS data files.
Dmitry Grigoryev, MD, PhD
Dr. Grigoryev is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Pediatrics at Children’s Mercy Hospitals and Clinics and Department of Biomedical and Health Informatics, University of Missouri School of Medicine at Kansas City. Dr. Grigoryev received 2.5 years postdoctoral training in Bioinformatics at NCI/NIH, where he learned and mastered Python language. He then served as Head, Data Analysis Unit in the Gene Expression Profiling Core in Center of Translational Respiratory Medicine in Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine for 7 years. Now he serves the same capacity in our Core of Genetic Research at CMH. He has been a microarray data analysis guru. Now, he has developed the pipelines for RNA-seq and exome-seq data analysis in our core to support the next generation sequence application of our group as well as other investigators at CMH.
Yan Li, PhD
Dr. Li is a PhD-level statistician who joined the MAHI research group in 2009. She obtained her PhD from the University of Florida in Gainesville and has been employed at MAHI ever since. She is an expert at working with large datasets, including the Cerner Healthfacts and AHA Get with the Guidelines Resuscitation database. She is an expert in the creation of risk-adjustment modeling and in handling clustered data. Her skills in handling missing data and the analysis of observational data for comparative effectiveness research are superb.
Mikhail Kosiborod, MD
Dr. Kosiborod is a Board Certified cardiologist devoting 50% of his time to clinical cardiology practice and 50% to outcomes research at MAHI. He received his MD degree from Mount Sinai School of Medicine, his internal medicine residency and cardiology fellowship at Yale-New Haven Hospital. He was a Robert Wood Johnson recipient having spent his research experience with Yale School of Medicine and the School of Public Health. He currently is an Associoate Professor of medicine at the UMKC School of Medicine.
Dr. Kosiborod is and internationally recognized authority on the intersection of diabetes and cardiovascular disease, having produced several of the landmark studies in the field. He is a member of the AHA’s Scientific Writing Group on Hyperglycemia in Acute Coronary Syndromes. He also has served on the abstract grading committees for AHA’s Annual Scientific Forum on Quality of Care and Outcomes Research and the American College of Cardiology Scientific Sessions. His research interests include clinically analyzing large datasets for glycemic control in ACS patients and anemia prevalence in heart failure. He has numerous peer-reviewed publications.
John Spertus, MD, MPH
Dr. Spertus is a the Missouri/Lauer Endowed Chair and Tenured Professor at the UMKC-School of Medicine. He is an Adjunct Professor at Washington University in Saint Louis and the University of Kansas. He is a nationally recognized researcher and expert in the field of cardiovascular outcomes research, patient-centered health status measurement, quality of care and performance measure development. Recently, he has pioneered the implementation of personalized medicine, based upon the execution of risk prediction models in routine clinical care, to improve the safety and outcomes of cardiovascular care. He received his MD from University of San Francisco as well as his internal medicine residency. His cardiology fellowship and MPH training were at the University of Washington.
Dr. Spertus has successfully led the Cardiovascular Outcomes Research section at the Mid America Heart Institute (MAHI) since 1996 where he serves as the Medical Director of Cardiovascular Outcomes Research. Dr Spertus has created the international standards for quantifying patient-centered outcomes, including the Seattle Angina Questionnaire, the Kansas City Cardiomyopathy Questionnaire and the Peripheral Artery Questionnaire. His grant portfolio includes a range of NIH, AHRQ, Foundation and industry projects amounting to over $35 million in the past 10 years. He has over 500 peer-reviewed publications.
Dr. Spertus is the founder and President of the Cardiovascular Outcomes, Inc., a 501(c)3 organization which coordinates the Cardiovascular Outcomes Research Consortium (CORC). CORC is a dynamic collection of the country’s leading cardiovascular outcomes researchers and has conducted several ground-breaking studies of the health status outcomes of HF and ACS patients. These registries have recently been leveraged for their detailed phenotypic description of patients’ outcomes to define the incremental prognostic importance of genetic polymorphisms and biomarkers. He co-founded and currently chairs the AHA’s Annual Scientific Forum on Quality of Care and Outcomes Research and has served on numerous committees for the ACC, AHA, VA, IOM, AMA and United Healthcare. He holds 9 patents and in 2009, he launched a new company, Health Outcomes Sciences, to support and disseminate his work throughout the country.
Fengming Tang, MS
Ms. Tang is a programmer/statistician who has been with the MAHI Outcomes Research Group since 2007. She is highly proficient in SAS and has had responsibility for the data management and creation of analytic datasets for the TRIUMPH study, a 26-center, post-MI registry that includes over 1600 data elements, including baseline and follow-up clinical data, as well as biomarker and genetic data; all emanating from diverse sources. She also oversees the data management and analysis of several American College of Cardiology National Cardiovascular Data Registries. She has been the lead analyst for the ACC’s PINNACLE database, which currently houses of 5 million outpatient records. These efforts have included numerous publications, quality assessment reports and CMS reporting for PQRS.
Hardware/Software
Biostatistics Core within the Cardiovascular Research Center at MAHI, which currently includes 12 statisticians (3 with doctorates, 9 with master’s degrees), has extensive experience in the analysis of clinical and health services data. The statisticians are highly versed in issues pertaining to observational data, including selection bias, missing data, propensity and instrumental variable models, latent class and variable analyses, Bayesian analyses, multivariable and hierarchical modeling, multiple imputation, etc. A thorough assessment of potential biases is essential in every study and often comprises the majority of analytic work. The team stays abreast of current methodological research and has a strong track record of applying new techniques to “real world” problems. The statisticians have and use state-of-the-art statistical packages, including SAS, SPSS, WinBUGS, R, S-Plus, M-Plus, PASS, STATA, TreeAge, etc. Finally, the statisticians have a strong commitment to working with trainees to enable them to refine their data management and analytic skills under close supervision, a critical step to independence.