Allison Lipitz-Snyderman , PhD

Dr. Allison Lipitz-Snyderman is a health services researcher in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at MSK. She is a member of the MSK Center for Health Policy and Outcomes. Her research is motivated by the problem that there are differences in the quality of cancer care across providers. This problem largely affects the most vulnerable patients. Dr. Lipitz-Snyderman is primarily focused on measuring the extent of variation in cancer care delivery both at the clinician and hospital levels. She has expertise in the analysis of large administrative datasets including Medicare claims. Dr. Lipitz-Snyderman received funding from the National Institute for Health Care Management Foundation to assess the extent of physician-driven variation in the use of services that tend to be overused. She is currently building on this work to examine hospital level variation in short- and long-term outcomes of cancer care.  Dr. Lipitz-Snyderman has also conducted research in the field of patient safety. She led a research team in the development of an oncology-specific ‘trigger tool’ that is relevant for use across the cancer care continuum. The tool enables efficient detection and assessment of harm due to medical care from patients’ medical records. Additional validation efforts are underway. This work was funded by the United Hospital Fund and AARP/OptumLabs. During her doctoral training at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, she worked on a evaluation of a multifaceted intervention, the Michigan Keystone ICU Project, aimed to reduce device-related bloodstream infections. She evaluated this initiative along the outcomes of mortality and length of stay using Medicare claims.