Research

Researchers talking

 

 

 

 

 

TDI’s faculty is made up of dozens of social scientists, engineers, clinician scientists, biostatisticians, and public health and health services researchers who are dedicated to improving health and healthcare for everyone. Our areas of research excellence include:

  • Understanding and reducing disparities in health outcomes based on geography, healthcare practices, state and local policies, payment models, and social determinants of health. An emerging area of expertise is health equity, including strategies for rebalancing national investments in social versus medical care in pursuit of better population health outcomes.
  • Developing “coproduction learning health systems,” in which patients’ experiences and the outcomes of real healthcare practices generate the data that researchers need to improve care. We are also developing and testing new strategies and models to improve patient-clinician communication and medical decision-making.
  • Innovative models of organization and financing of healthcare delivery to support high-value care delivery.
  • Causal inference and social network methods.
  • Quality improvement methods and practices.

Sampling of Research Teams at TDI

The Sustainable Health Lab
Inas Khayal, PhD
Engineering a Structural Transformation of the Healthcare Delivery System for Chronic Conditions
The Sustainable Health Lab develops systems engineering-based models and analytics to systemically quantify care delivery for chronic conditions across the interconnected healthcare delivery system. Through systems modeling, data science, and analytics for complex healthcare systems, the lab addresses healthcare equity, implementation, improvement, and system (re)design.

The Gunn Lab
Christine M. Gunn, PhD
The Gunn Lab conducts a community-engaged program of research focused on risk communication, decision-making, and the utilization of evidence-based care. Our studies investigate how patients and providers negotiate the experience of being at risk for cancer and how risk communication interventions impact the utilization of health services. One specific example of this work is designing and implementing a decision aid for breast cancer screening, with an emphasis on optimizing for populations with limited health literacy and those exposed to environmental risks. Other areas of interest include cancer survivorship care, patient navigation, emerging cancer screening technologies and policy, and patient-partnered research methods.

RISE Lab
Amber Barnato, MD, MPH, MS
Research and Innovation in SErious Illness Care
The Rise Lab works at the intersection of serious illness care, medical decision-making, and health disparities research. The overarching hypothesis underlying our work is that local organizational social norms influence physicians’ heuristics – or unconscious judgments – regarding whether a patient is near the end of life and therefore best served by a serious illness conversation to explore goals and values for end-of-life treatment.

Coproduction Collaboratory
The Coproduction Collaboratory at The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy & Clinical Practice develops, evaluates, and implements tools and care processes that support partnerships between patients, clinicians, and researchers to promote the discovery of new knowledge. Multiple investigators, clinicians, scientists, and staff members participate in coproduction research at TDI.

Research Services

Center for Program Design and Evaluation (CPDE)
CPDE is a fee-for-service research center specializing in mixed methods evaluation and program design. The team’s expertise spans anthropology, business, education, life sciences, medicine, psychology, and public health, affording a unique position to assist organizations and programs of all types.

Data Storage and Management

Detailed information about managing data use agreements (DUAs), data storage, and user compliance is available on these pages. (The Data Analytic Core (DAC) has closed its operations as of June 30, 2024.)