ICHPS Outreach Committee Members
The International Conference on Health Policy Statistics will take place in Scottsdale, Arizona, January 9–11, 2023. After a delay due to COVID-19, the meeting will bring practitioners, methodologists, health service researchers, health economists, and policy analysts together to exchange and build on ideas about improving the pipeline of health policy research.
Keynote Speakers
Sherry Glied will share insights on how to connect the dots and turn research evidence into evidence policymakers can use. She will focus on why many efforts to draw policy inferences about best population approaches to mitigate the COVID-19 pandemic failed. She will also argue that, in contrast to the progress made in collecting and analyzing data, the methods we use to organize, aggregate, synthesize, and make sense of those varied observations have hardly changed.
Elizabeth Stuart of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health will serve as a discussant.
Glied serves as dean of New York University’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service. Previously, she held positions at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the President’s Council of Economic Advisers.
The second keynote will be given by Ziad Obermeyer from the University of California, Berkeley. He will discuss innovative ways we can use machine learning to better understand the quality of health care being received on a daily basis. In particular, he will show how machine learning may be used to identify over- and under-testing for heart attacks in the emergency room and trace the behavioral underpinning of errors in such decisions to both bounded rationality and systematic biases, suggesting a central role for physician error in generating low-value health care for patients.
A Q&A with Casey Ross, a national technology correspondent at STAT, will follow Obermeyer’s talk. Ross’s reporting examines the use of artificial intelligence in medicine and its underlying questions of safety, fairness, and privacy.
Obermeyer is associate professor and Blue Cross of California Distinguished Professor at the Berkeley School of Public Health. His research and teaching focus on the intersection of machine learning and health. He is a cofounder of Nightingale Open Science, a nonprofit that makes massive new medical imaging data sets available for research, and Dandelion, a platform for artificial intelligence innovation in health. He also continues to practice emergency medicine in underserved communities.
Workshops
The conference will contain 14 training workshops on topics relevant to contemporary health policy research, including the following:
- Causal inference
- Analysis of complex longitudinal data
- Statistical methods for electronic health record data
- National Center for Health Statistics data linkages and applications
- Navigating US federal health agencies’ structure and data
- Structural equation modeling
- Meta-analysis
- Social network analyses
- Observational Health Data Sciences and Informatics collaborative and OMOP Common Data model
These workshops present opportunities for attendees at all levels to obtain new training in areas of interest or improve their current skills in these areas. Topics address all parts of the research pipeline, allowing attendees to upgrade their skills in multiple areas over the course of the first day.
Special Events
On the evening of January 10, there will be a plenary session titled “Reproductive Health Policy IS Public Health Policy.” This session will address the adverse consequences of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization on health care across the US. As such, this session will tackle the pressing public health problem of abortion policy and access post-Dobbs.
Speakers are J. Chris Carey, a retired obstetrician/gynecologist who has worked to ensure access to and education about abortion and contraception, and Amanda Jean Stevenson, a demographer who measures the effects of abortion policy on population health.
This session will address both the clinical and public health aspects of this acute and growing public health crisis, and discussion will center on what we as health policy statisticians can do to help.
On the afternoon of January 10, there will be an anti-racism town hall devoted to understanding what is needed for the ASA to become an anti-racist association and how specific methodological choices affect health policy research in this domain. Attendees will identify opportunities for health policy and health services researchers to advance anti-racist research areas. Most importantly, this session will allow for a robust, honest, and respectful question-and-answer session with a panel comprised of ASA Anti-Racism Task Force members. Those in the audience will be encouraged to ask questions about the task force’s activities and recommendations.
On the morning of January 10, our “Meet the Editor” session will bring together editors from top medical and health policy journals to share their experiences, discuss the characteristics of successful submissions, and define what health policy statistics researchers should take care to do (and not do) as they seek to disseminate their work in high-impact publications. The editors include Johan Ayanian, editor in chief of JAMA Health Forum; Sharon-Lise Normand, statistics editor at the New England Journal of Medicine and NEJM Evidence; and John Wong, statistics and modeling editor at the Annals of Internal Medicine.
Finally, on the morning of January 11, we will offer a session titled “Unintended Consequences of High-Impact Health Policy Research.” Speakers are Arlene S. Ash and David Etzioni, chair of the department of surgery at the Mayo Clinic, Arizona. They will discuss what happens when novel methods for guiding health policy become adopted in unintended ways, with a particular focus on hospital risk adjustment and surgical quality assessment.
Student Events
In addition to honoring several students with travel awards, the conference committee members are devoted to ensuring students feel welcome. The meeting provides an opportunity for students and other developing scholars to network and engage with leading methodologists in the field via our poster sessions, student luncheon, and roundtables.
Students will receive reduced conference registration, and all workshops will be free for them. In addition, a student luncheon with a career development panel will take place January 10. People working in both academia and industry will be invited to share their experiences and thoughts about career development and answer questions from students.
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