Research

My research grew out of a simple question: why do some people get good pain care and others don't?

I study the pathway from identifying that someone could benefit from evidence-based pain or rehabilitation care to that person actually receiving enough treatment to benefit. Along that pathway, patients may need to be recognized as having a treatment need, offered or referred to appropriate care, successfully connected with services, begin treatment, remain engaged, and receive care that responds to their needs over time.

At each step, people can be lost.

My research asks where those gaps occur, why they occur, and what patients, clinicians, and health systems can do about them.

Research Focus

Some challenges are structural, including insurance design, neighborhood conditions, transportation, and the availability of rehabilitation and behavioral health services. Others arise inside health systems through screening and identification practices, referral processes, scheduling, clinical workflows, and the way care is documented. Patients may also decide that a recommended treatment is not feasible, acceptable, or worthwhile. And even after treatment begins, care can fall short when engagement is difficult to sustain or when clinicians collect useful information but lack the tools or support to interpret and act on it.

My goal is to make evidence-based pain and rehabilitation care easier to identify when it is needed, easier to reach, easier to use, and more responsive to the people it is meant to help.

I approach these questions through three connected areas of work.

Health services and care pathway research. I use electronic health records, national datasets, geospatial methods, and other population-based data to study who is identified for and receives evidence-based pain and rehabilitation care, where patients fall out of the care pathway, and how health system and community factors shape treatment access and use.

Patient-centered measurement and decision science. I study how treatment need, referral, initiation, engagement, and care delivery should be measured; how patients weigh treatment options; and how patient-reported outcomes and other clinical data can better support real clinical decisions.

Intervention and implementation research. I develop and test strategies that help health systems connect patients with evidence-based care and help patients begin and remain engaged in treatment, while also studying what clinicians and organizations need to successfully deliver those strategies in routine practice.

Across these projects, I am interested in the same underlying question: how can patients, clinicians, and health systems better translate an identified need for treatment into care that people can actually access, use, and benefit from?