Dr. Allison Lipitz-Snyderman is a health services researcher in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK). She is a member of the MSK Center for Health Policy and Outcomes. Her research is motivated by the problem that there are inequities 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 (NIHCM) 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 focused on patient safety research. For example, she led an effort to develop and test an oncology-specific ‘trigger tool’ that is relevant for use across the cancer care continuum. This tool enables efficient detection and assessment of harm due to medical care from patients’ medical records. This work was funded by the United Hospital Fund. Her prior work included an evaluation of a multifaceted intervention, the Michigan Keystone ICU Project, aimed to reduce device-related bloodstream infections across the state of Michigan. She evaluated this initiative along the outcomes of mortality and length of stay using Medicare claims.
