Susan Desharnais, PhD

Dr. Susan DesHarnais is a health services researcher whose main area of interest is quality of care. She has worked with many large data sets, and has developed methods for the risk-adjustment of hospital outcome data.

She has over thirty years of experience in the area of Health Services Research, including eight years at Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Michigan, where she developed a variety of innovative approaches to using their databases for utilization review purposes, and for fraud and abuse audits. Since that time she has used a variety of public and private databases for research on the quality and effectiveness of the health care system in the United States. Her research has focused on developing methods of risk adjustment, so that one can make valid comparisons of outcomes across health care facilities treating different types of patients.

She was also the Scientific Director of the National Cancer Data Base. In that position she was successful in redesigning the National Cancer Data Base into a well-documented relational database, with web-based data entry, quality controls, edits of data submissions in real time, and the capacity to produce reports using SPSS and Cognos. The redesign resulted in web-based benchmark reports for each facility, and addressed HIPPA compliance concern. Recently she was PI on a study of physician-patient communication patterns related to end-of-life decision making. Her main interest is in developing methods to improve the care given to elderly patients.