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Amber E. Barnato, MD, MS, MPH

Contact Information

Professional Interests

1) Improving serious illness and end-of-life care
2) Physician communication decision making
3) Advancing health equity and reducing health disparities
4) Promoting careers of health services researchers underrepresented in medicine and health sciences

Grant Information

Current:
P01 AG019783-21 (NIA)
Barnato (Overall PI, Core Lead, Project Lead)
08/15/2023-07/31/2028
Causes and Consequences of Healthcare Inequities in ADRD

K23 MD015277 (NIMHD)
Chuang (PI), Barnato (Mentor)  
09/18/2021-05/31/2025 
Targeting Bias to Reduce Disparities in End-of-Life Care (BRiDgE) 

RSG-22-128-01-HOPS (American Cancer Society)
Khayal (PI); Role: Co-investigator
01/2023 – 12/2027
Identifying hospital and patient social determinants of health factors from hospital-level cancer healthcare disparities

Completed, last 2 years:

P01 AG019783  (NIA)
Barnato (Overall PI, Core Lead, Project Lead)  
05/01/2018-07/31/2023 
Causes and Consequences of Healthcare Efficiency 

132358-RSG-18-017-01-CPHPS (American Cancer Society)
Barnato (PI)  
07/01/2018-06/30/2022 
Variation in Cancer Centers’ End-of-Life Quality - Role of Norms 

R21AG065704 (NIA)
Barnato/Khayal (MPI)         
09/15/2020-08/31/2023
Classification of the Typologies of Hospital Deaths 

Courses Taught

Past:
PH100 Inferential Methods, MPH program (2022)
Population Health and Preventive Care, MHCDS program (2019, 2020)

Mentoring Information

I am an experienced mentor and have been recognized with the Distinguished Mentor Award from the Institute for Clinical Research Education at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. In addition to advising more than 60 medical students in my role directing a dual MD/MS program at the University of Pittsburgh, I have served on 6 PhD committees and served as primary or secondary mentor to 8 pre-doctoral students, 9 post-doctoral fellows, and 12 faculty, including 9 NIH-funded K-awardees. Of these K-awardees, 7 have progressed to independence and 1 is still in her training period (K23 MD015277) and 1 unexpectedly died before completing her K08. Most of my research mentees have been women who seek me out for gender-concordant mentoring and 2 have been women of color. In addition to my mentoring experience, I previously served as a member of the leadership team of the University of Pittsburgh Institute for Clinical Research Education before moving to Dartmouth. This included oversight of a portfolio of early-career institutional training awards including T35, T32, and KL2 programs. At Dartmouth I am the Director of an organization-spanning institute at Dartmouth that launched 4 educational programs (MPH, MS, MHCDS, and PhD), the Dartmouth Health Equity Research Pathways career development programs which provides funding and support for early career scientists dedicated to health equity research from undergraduates through junior faculty, and the Levy Incubator which provides structured support for Geisel faculty and their teams to redesign healthcare delivery.

Biography

I am the John E. Wennberg Distinguished Professor and Director of the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth. I am trained in two medical specialties, public health and preventive medicine and hospice and palliative medicine. My research focuses on understanding the causes and consequences of variation in end-of-life intensive care unit (ICU) and life-sustaining treatment use among seriously ill older adults using an array of scientific methods, including claims data analysis, participant observation and interviewing, high-fidelity simulation experiments, and randomized behavioral trials. My work increasingly focuses on the interplay between organizational norms, provider-patient communication, and implicit cognition, and how these phenomena produce racial disparities in end-of-life treatment. I have been continuously funded by the National Institutes of Health since 2003, have been the Principal Investigator or Project Leader of more than 23 extramurally-funded awards, authored more than 170 peer-reviewed publications, and mentored more than 70 pre-doctoral and post-doctoral scientists. My academic program development work focuses on early career development for clinician-scientists (see Mentoring, above). I am the past Vice President of the Society for Medical Decision Making (SMDM) and will co-chair the 2024 SMDM annual meeting at Boston University. As part of my policy advocacy work, I oversees the Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care and am leading the development of the Dartmouth Health Equity Atlas. In addition to my academic work, I collects and shares stories from diverse family members regarding their experiences making life-support decisions for patients in the ICU at the website www.ICUStoryWeb.org. I live in Hanover with my husband, Greg Crowley, Director of the Office of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging at Dartmouth Health, and our two children. I enjoy reading novels, hiking, and alpine skiing.