1. Health Information Analytics – Homecare:

Higher rates of hospitalization from patients who are discharged from home-based care result in higher costs of care. Currently, doctors prescribe homecare services based on standardized care plans defined by payors and agency owners. This research uses an observational causal inference approach to assess the impact of combinations of services provided by home health agencies on end-of-episode disposition for individuals with chronic diseases. This research demonstrates the opportunity to modify these standardized care plans to include a combination of services that more effectively reduce acute care hospitalization rates. This research has resulted in a manuscript submitted to a journal, a finalist poster at the INFORMS annual meeting 2017 poster competition and is acting as foundational work for a proposal to submit for a grant.

2. The stock-out severity index in last mile supply chain for pharmaceuticals:

My dissertation research is interdisciplinary and motivated by inequities experienced by populations at the last mile and the Sustainable Development Goals set by the United Nations. This looks specifically at how results from the public health domain that identify the determinants of health can be combined with stock-out data to develop a better understanding of inequity. A measurement framework, the stock-out severity index (SSI), is developed. My research shows that using an equity prioritization scheme results in different priorities than looking at stock-outs themselves. A protocol is also developed to be able to use the SSI to measure inequity due to pharmaceutical stock-outs in other regions.  This research is funded by the Community for Global Health Equity at the University at Buffalo. This work has yielded in a conference poster presentation, a talk and has been submitted to a journal.

3. Mobile Pharmacies to reduce inequities due to stock-outs:

Another part of my dissertation research focuses on the SSI as a prioritization metric to supply pharmaceuticals to villages in order to reduce inequities due to drug-stock outs. The SSI, being dynamic in nature, results in a non-linear cost function. As a theoretical contribution of this work, to solve this, a branch and bound approach is used and a lower bound estimation method is proved. I presented my research on drug stock-outs at the EURO 2018 conference and have submitted the manuscript resulting from this research to a journal for publication.