Dr. Prescott conducts health services research to understand and improve the long-term outcomes of acute medical illnesses, drawing on the tools of ‘big data’ analytics and implementation science. Her initial focus is reducing the need for repeated hospitalization after severe sepsis, including an examination of hospital readmissions and healthcare utilization among sepsis survivors, with a goal of helping develop novel clinical interventions to improve recovery and reduce healthcare utilization among this population.
What drew you to MiCHAMP?
I was drawn to MiCHAMP because of the unique collaboration between data scientists and physician researchers. Too often research is siloed between fields, which limits progress. MiCHAMP brings together data scientists and physicians every week to build common ground and use data science to answer pressing medical questions. As a result of the diverse membership of MiCHAMP, I learn something new at every meeting.
What specific expertise do you bring to MiCHAMP?
I am a practicing medical intensivist and pulmonologist with strong methodological training in health services research, biostatistics, and causal inference, as well as some training in machine learning and data science.
What are your research interests and how do they tie into MiCHAMP?
My primary research focus is on sepsis survivorship, with a growing interest in hospital benchmarking by “template matching” methods. Both of these interests overlap well with MiCHAMP, in that there are many important unanswered questions that lend themselves to data science solutions.
Sepsis is a syndrome of organ dysfunction caused by a dysregulated response to infection. The majority of patients with sepsis survive hospitalization but in a weakened state. Medical set-backs and re-hospitalization are very common in sepsis survivors. My career development award uses granular clinical data and prior healthcare utilization data to predict which patients will have specific, common, preventable re-hospitalizations, in order to better tailor medical treatment in the immediate post-hospital setting.