Medical decision making encompasses a variety of research disciplines and employs normative theory and descriptive theory. Normative theory, or “decision analysis”, is concerned with identifying the most rational decision. Descriptive theory, or “judgment and decision making psychology”, is concerned with describing the decisions that people actually make.
Faculty
Timothy Anderson, MD, MAS
Dr. Timothy Anderson is a primary care physician and health services researcher whose primary research interests are identifying strategies to improve the quality and equity of care delivered to older adults with chronic conditions and to optimize medication use for patients in the hospital and at home.
(Joyce) Chung-Chou H. Chang, PhD
Dr. Chang has a wide range of interests in theoretical and applied statistics, including time-to-event (survival) and longitudinal data analysis, missing data (competing risks and informative dropout), causal effect modeling (propensity score and marginal structural modeling), design and analysis of observational studies and clinical trials, design and analysis of studies of biomarkers in risk prediction, dynamic prediction, and machine learning techniques.
Janel Hanmer, MD, PhD
Dr. Hanmer's primary research focus is on health-related quality of life measurement, particularly health utility measurement. Dr. Hanmer's recent work has been focused on developing a new health utility score for the Patient-Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System (PROMIS). This work combines item response theory and econometric theory. The resulting PROMIS-Preference (PROPr) score is now being evaluated for population health monitoring and longitudinal validity.
Tamar Krishnamurti, PhD
Dr. Krishnamurti is a PhD-trained behavioral scientist. Her research develops processes, (digital) tools, and communication strategies, grounded in psychological theory, to support informed decision making. Dr. Krishnamurti's work is highly interdisciplinary. She works closely with experts across the fields of psychology, medicine, computer science, engineering, and public health. While she primarily focuses on health in pregnancy and the postpartum period among US populations, she does work, both domestically and internationally, in areas ranging from addiction to climate change.
José Giovanni Luiggi-Hernández, PhD, MPH
Dr. Luiggi-Hernández has over a decade of research experiences contributing to projects covering psychotherapy process and outcomes for both physical and mental health conditions, clinical decision-making, digital health technologies, program evluations, pre-implementation research, health disparities, social determinants of health, substsance use, and more.
Kenneth J. Smith, MD, MS
Dr. Smith’s research centers on the cost-effectiveness of common medical interventions, most notably on pneumococcal, influenza, and varicella vaccination and on the impact of racial disparities in vaccination rates. He has published in many other areas, including pelvic inflammatory disease, influenza management strategies, diabetes prevention and treatment, VA formulary decisions, anticoagulation and thrombotic disorder management, and hospital-physician communication.
Katie J. Suda, PharmD, MS, FCCP
Associate Director, Center for Pharmaceutical Policy and Prescribing
Associate Director, VA Center for Health Equity Research and Promotion
Dr. Suda’s area of research is pharmacoepidemiology, especially in the area of antimicrobials, and dual use of VA and non-VA health care. Currently, she is researching antibiotics and opioids in dental prescribing, including a focus on veteran health