Staff

Sebastian Schneeweiss, MD, ScD

Co-Chair, Center for Integrated Healthcare Data Research, is the Chief of the Division of Pharmacoepidemiology and Pharmacoeconomics, Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and Professor of Epidemiology at Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health. He is Principal Investigator of the FDA/CDER-funded Sentinel Innovation Center at Harvard, Duke University, Vanderbilt University, and the University of Washington. He was named an inaugural member of the Methodology Committee of the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI), was Director of Agency for Healthcare Research & Quality (AHRQ)’s DEcIDE Comparative Effectiveness Research Methods Center. He has over 20 years of experience in comparative effectiveness research based on electronic healthcare data. He is the Co-chair of the Center for Integrated Healthcare Data Research and oversees the operations of the Center. He will devise the Center’s strategy for growth, customer service, quality assurance and sustainability.

Shawn Murphy, MD, PhD

Co-Chair, Center for Integrated Healthcare Data Research, is a Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School and Director of Partners HealthCare Research Information Systems. Dr. Murphy developed the Research Patient Data Registry (RPDR) for Mass General Brigham, which serves over 5,000 investigators performing research using the hospital medical record. This application served as the test bed in developing the open-source Informatics for Integrating Biology and the Bedside (i2b2) software platform now operating at over 120 hospitals worldwide. He was Co-PI of the Accessible Research Commons for Health (ARCH), a clinical data research network of the Patient-Centered Clinical Research Network (PCORnet). He is the Co-chair of the Center for Integrated Healthcare Data Research and oversees the integration of the long-term outcome data sources into the Mass General Brigham research query tools via the “Big Data Commons” data integration strategy.

Joshua K. Lin, MD, ScD, MPH

Executive Director, Center for Integrated Healthcare Data Research, is a practicing general internist, a pharmacoepidemiologist in the Division of Pharmacoepidemiology and Pharmacoeconomics at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH), and an Assistant Professor in Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He is the PI of multiple NIH-funded large-scale studies aiming to improve validity of comparative effectiveness research (CER) using EHR linked with insurance claims data. He led an initiative to link the Medicare and Medicaid insurance claims data with electronic health records (EHR) of the Accessible Research Commons for Health (ARCH), a clinical data research network of the Patient-Centered Clinical Research Network (PCORnet). He has published extensively about drug safety and effectiveness using EHR and claims data in vulnerable populations in high impact medical journals. His pioneer work has resulted in validated algorithms substantially reducing the information bias due to care received outside of study provider system, a pervasive bias in the US EHR system. As the Executive Director of the Center for Integrated Healthcare Data Research, Dr. Lin will lead a team of research scientists and administrators to manage the day-to-day operations of the Center, including writing and executing data use agreements, requesting data and conducting linkage, developing and executing data curating measures, and reviewing Mass General Brigham research requests for usage of the linked LTO data assets.

Alisa B. Busch, MD, MS

Is an Associate Professor of Psychiatry at McLean Hospital and Assistant Professor of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School. She is the chief medical information officer at McLean Hospital, and chief of the Health Services Research Division for Partners Psychiatry and Mental Health. Dr. Busch is nationally recognized for her work on measuring mental health and substance use disorder (MH/SUD) treatment quality in systems of care. She has served on national technical expert panels on quality measurement in usual care MH/SUD treatment settings for the Institute of Medicine, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration (SAMHSA), and the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE). Most recently she has served on the CMS Technical Expert Panel for Inpatient Psychiatric Facilities (IPF) Measure Development and Maintenance Project for the development of new IPF quality measures for psychiatric facilities.

Elizabeth W. Loder, MD, MPH

Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School and Chief of the Division of Headache in the Department of Neurology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Brigham and Women’s Faulkner Hospital. A headache clinician, researcher and head of the research section of the BMJ, she is a past President of the American Headache Society and has served on the Executive Council of the International Headache Society. She is a past president of the New England Pain Society and is the Vice President of the Headache Cooperative of New England.

Joseph F. Merola, MD, MMSc

Associate Professor in the Department of Dermatology and Department of Medicine, Division of Rheumatology at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts. Dr. Merola is board-certified in Dermatology, Internal Medicine, and Rheumatology. He serves as Director of the Clinical Unit for Research Innovation and Trials (CUReIT), Director of the Center for Skin and Related Musculoskeletal Diseases and the Associate Program Director for the Harvard Combined Internal Medicine-Dermatology Residency Training Program at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. Dr. Merola’s research focuses on autoimmunity in psoriasis/psoriatic arthritis and connective tissue disorders (e.g. cutaneous and systemic lupus erythematosus, dermatomyositis, systemic sclerosis). He is on the Medical Board of the National Psoriasis Foundation, the Board of the International Dermatology Outcome Measures Group and Steering Committee Member for GRAPPA (Group for Research and Assessment of Psoriasis and Psoriatic Arthritis), the Board of the Lupus Foundation of America and is on the Board and Founding President of the Psoriasis and Psoriatic Arthritis Clinics Multicenter Advancement Network Consortium (PPACMAN).

Joshua P. Metlay, MD, PhD

Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Chief of the Division of General Internal Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital. Dr. Metlay’s research spans two major areas, the epidemiology of drug resistance among common bacterial respiratory pathogens, particularly S. pneumoniae and the development and evaluation of interventions to improve the quality of treatment decisions for respiratory tract infections. This research has led to numerous federal grants from NIAID, CDC, and AHRQ and roles on national advisory committees in the area of infectious diseases epidemiology. Dr. Metlay is dedicated to education and mentorship. He has been recognized with a number of honors including the Lindback Foundation Award for Distinguished Teaching in 2008 (Pen’s highest teaching honor), the Mid-Career Research and Mentorship Award from the Society of General Internal Medicine in 2010, and the Arthur Asbury Outstanding Faculty Mentorship Award from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania in 2011.

Lee H. Schwamm, MD

Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School, and C. Miller Fisher Chair of Vascular Neurology at MGH, where he is Executive Vice Chairman of Neurology, Director of the Comprehensive Stroke Center and the Center for TeleHealth. He serves as co-chair of the Partners Innovation Council, and Chair of Stroke Quality for Partners Healthcare. He is the author of >400 peer-reviewed articles, and chaired many of the current practice guidelines for stroke and telehealth-enabled care delivery. He has received numerous awards for innovation, leadership and advocacy in the field of stroke. His pioneering work includes the leadership of the first large-scale and longest-running national academic TeleStroke Network, and the AHA’s Get With the Guidelines-Stroke, the world largest stroke registry with >5 million patient records. His clinical interests are in cerebrovascular diseases, telehealth and clinical trials, and he is a recognized leader in the fields of acute stroke treatment, stroke systems of care, health services research, and telehealth. His research has been funded by numerous organizations, including Harvard, MIT, NIBIB, NINDS, CDC, PCORI AHRQ, HRSA and the Department of the Army

Daniel H. Solomon, MD, MPH

Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Chief of the Section of Clinical Sciences in Rheumatology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. The focus of his research is the epidemiology, economics, and quality of rheumatic disease care. He serves as the Chair of the FDA’s Arthritis Advisory Committee and focuses much of his work on the comparative safety and effectiveness of treatments for arthritis. Specific topics of interest include indicators of quality prescribing, quality improvement in osteoporosis care, and cardiovascular disease in patients with arthritis. Dr. Solomon is Deputy Editor of Arthritis & Rheumatology. He is the principal investigator on multiple federal grants including a program project grant (Verity) that gives rheumatic disease researchers core infrastructure for integrated data research. He holds the Matthew Liang Distinguished Chair in Population Sciences and has received numerous awards for research and mentoring. He attended Yale College, Yale School of Medicine, and Harvard School of Public Health. His residency and fellowship training in rheumatology were completed at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. As well, his clinical practice is at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

Shirley Wang, PhD, ScM

Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Associate Epidemiologist in the Division of Pharmacoepidemiology and Pharmacoeconomics at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. She is a pharmacoepidemiologist focused on developing innovative, non-traditional analytic methods to understand the safety and effectiveness of medication use in clinical care as well as facilitating appropriate use of complex methods for analyzing large observational healthcare data. To that end, she has developed enhancements to epidemiologic study designs and analytic methods as well as led efforts to guide appropriate use of complex methods for analyzing large observational healthcare data. Shirley has been involved with the US Food and Drug Administration’s Sentinel Initiative since 2011 and her methods work has been recognized with awards from two international research societies. She recently led a joint task force for the International Society for Pharmacoepidemiology (ISPE) and the International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research (ISPOR) focused on improving the credibility of real world evidence for decision-makers and launched the REPEAT Initiative (www.repeatinitiative.org), a non-profit program with projects designed to improve transparency, reproducibility and ability to assess validity of healthcare database studies. Shirley was a writing group member for a National Academy of Medicine white paper on executing and operationalizing open science and is currently a Steering Committee member for a Transparency Initiative, a partnership led by ISPOR, ISPE, Duke-Margolis Center for Health Policy, National Pharmaceutical Council (NPC), and a number of other key organizations and stakeholders.

Joel S. Weissman, PhD

Deputy Director and Chief Scientific Officer of the Center for Surgery and Public Health at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and professor of surgery in health policy at Harvard Medical School. In addition to surgical health services, his research interests lie in the areas of patient-centered quality and safety, payment reform, disparities/vulnerable populations, uncompensated care, drug policy, comparative effectiveness research policy, and academic-industry relationships.

Li Zhou, MD, PhD, FACMI

Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School and a Lead Investigator at the Division of General Internal Medicine and Primary Care of the Brigham and Women’s Hospital. She has served as a Senior Medical Informatician at Partners HealthCare System for more than 10 years. Her research has focused on various subfields of artificial intelligence and their applications to medicine, including temporal reasoning, natural language processing, machine learning and decision support. Dr. Zhou directs the MTERMS Lab and has led the design and development of multiple NLP systems (e.g., MTERMS, TimeText and NotesLink). Her teams have applied NLP and machine learning to diverse clinical domains, including phenotyping, medication reconciliation, allergy, adverse drug reaction detection, nurse assessment, family histories, social-behavioral factors, hospital readmission, and mortality predication. They investigate the use of speech recognition in clinical documentation. They also combine NLP and machine learning to extract knowledge from malpractice claims data to enhance coding and analytics for risk management. Dr. Zhou is a Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics. She serves as an Associate Editor for the International Journal of Medical Informatics. She has served as principal investigator and co-investigator on numerous research projects funded by AHRQ, NIH, PCORI, NCI and CRICO/RMF.