Ari Robicsek’s Post

People assume that little important research happens at big community healthcare systems. They’re wrong. I’m super proud to release Providence’s Research Annual Report on Clinical Trials Day. Last year our investigators did nearly $130M in research. Much of this was in the form of clinical trials (THANK YOU, trialists!) that bring hope to individuals with hard-to-treat diseases. We’re also doing a huge body of health services research, with a special focus on health equity. And increasingly, we’re operating as a large-scale evidence engine for testing new technologies in real-life settings. Last year we published in The Lancet, The New England Journal of Medicine and Nature Medicine, and there’s a lot more coming! Hats off to researchers working in the real world. #clinicaltrials #thefutureofhealth #research #healthcaretransformation #genomics #cancerresearch #healthservicesrsearch #healthequity

I’m fortunate enough to head up a 175-person healthcare analytics department whose job is, as our CEO puts it, “to make everyone smarter”. We have an enormous amount of data from our 52 hospitals and >1,000 sites of care, all on a single electronic medical record (plus we have a great deal more from our nationwide partners at Truveta). Traditionally, we’ve spent much of our time using this data to develop performance management dashboards (PMDs). These PMDs are necessary but not sufficient for “being smarter”. We need to also be able to answer critical questions that drive better care, like “Why is this happening?”; “How do we do this better?”; “Which management pathways work best?”  To catalyze this work, we’re looking for data scientists in our Advanced Analytics group whose superpower is turning retrospective data into insights. (This means you, experts in RWE, HEOR and epidemiology.) Curious? Check this out: #heor #healthcare #analytics #RWE #epidemiology #datascience #ISPOR #pharmacoepidemiology #comparativeeffectiveness #causalinference

Imagine if you could assemble thousands of people with a disease into a team of citizen scientists to make discoveries about that disease. You could learn about its symptoms, how they play out over time, and how they affect every aspect of someone’s life, from people WITH that disease rather than from the doctors who treat it. Turns out this is possible, and that what we learn from the voice of these patients adds a great deal to our understanding. In the summer of 2020, before anyone knew about long COVID, we started asking Providence patients to volunteer as citizen scientists, journalling in their own words about their experiences over the course of a year. Thousands of volunteers stepped up. 634 of these volunteers went on to develop long COVID, journalling all the way. Together they created an intimate and detailed picture of what it was like to experience COVID, through its early symptoms and on into chronic disease. Our researchers at CORE and the Providence Research Network have used this incredibly rich document to identify four different ways in which long COVID plays out (long COVID is not long COVID is not long COVID). The paper describing their findings was just published in Scientific Reports. Huge gratitude to our citizen scientists and our researchers, Keri Vartanian, Daniel Fish, Natalie Kenton, Ben Gronowski and Bill Wright! #covid-19 #longcovid #healthservicesresearch #medicalresearch #medicalanalytics #patientreportedoutcomes #citizenscience

Really interesting (and rare!) opportunity for a physician who ‘speaks data’, burns with intellectual curiosity, loves to solve hard problems, knows how to use the scientific method to answer questions using large clinical datasets and is a thoughtful leader of people. Providence has ~50 hospitals and 1000 ambulatory sites on Epic and co-founded the national Truveta data consortium; we also have terrific internal data infrastructure and a large and merry band of data engineers and data scientists. We ALSO have an implementation science/health services research shop with amazing researchers and data scientists. We’re hiring a Chief of Clinical Analytics to lead a critical team in our healthcare analytics org. The position will work with all the above, report to me, and can be remote. If this sounds interesting, check out the link below. Feel free to DM me if you’d like more info. #jobs #healthcareanalytics #healthcare #qualityimprovement #dataanalytics #datascience #implementationscience #healthservices #physician #llm #datavisualization

I’m so proud of the research happening at Providence. This past year we conducted more than $100M in research, including 3300 active studies and over 1500 publications and presentations, including in NEJM, JAMA and Cell. Our work included advances in cancer immunotherapy, health equity and integrating advanced technologies into community practice settings. And it demonstrated how a large healthcare system can serve as an “evidence engine”, delivering vital discoveries on how to move the needle in a real-life setting. Huge kudos to our investigators and research teams around the system, and to our collaborators at Microsoft and the Institute for System Biology. Read more in our just-published annual report. #microsoft #isb #medicalresearch #medicalinnovation #cancertherapy #clinicalresearch #providence

Super excited that Truveta Studio has launched. It’s a deidentified data repository covering 70 million people across the US. At its core is very rich Electronic Medical Record data, and this is combined with powerful outside data sources like LexisNexis. Analytics and Research teams at Providence can (finally!) access it to answer critical questions about how to make healthcare better. Which is good – we have a LOTS of questions! #healthcare #dataanalytics #healthservices #research

Hot off the press…practical epidemiology out of Providence and The University of Chicago just published in JAMA. The question we asked was: if you’re already fully Covid-19 vaccinated, how much extra protection do you get from a booster, and for how long? Answer: you get about 70% extra protection against severe infection for 4 to 5 months, with some lower level protection persisting after that. (What does ‘70% extra’ mean? If your risk of severe infection after vaccination was 1%, in our study a booster brought it down to 0.3%.) #covid19 #jama #medicalresearch #epidemiology #dataanalytics #vaccines #booster

So proud of the work done by Providence cancer researchers Rom Leidner, Eric Tran and colleagues, just published in the NEJM. They engineered immune cells with "exquisite specificity" for targeting an individual patient's metastatic cancer of the pancreas. Her cancer responded remarkably. This research is changing the future of medicine. #cancerresearch #immunooncology #providence #NEJM #medicalresearch #earleachiles #providenceresearchnetwork

Can a doctor in Missoula improve heart care for the entire country? (Hint: YES!) I'm so proud of national clinical trials leader Dr Dan Spoon who had a great chat with Amy Compton-Phillips, M.D. about clinical trials. Here's how big hearted Montanans and the Providence Research Network are contributing to a better future. #providence #research #interventionalcardiology #clinicaltrials