Meet Our Team - BESTMED study

Steering Committee

Principal Investigator

Alexander Turchin

Mass General Brigham

Dr. Turchin is the Director of Informatics Research and Director of Quality in Diabetes at the Division of Endocrinology at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) and Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He is a PCORI, NIH and AHRQ-funded investigator who has carried out several studies using real world data to study outcomes of chronic cardiometabolic disease. Dr. Turchin is also an actively practicing general endocrinologist who treats many patients with diabetes, hypertension, hyperlipidemia and coronary artery disease.

Co-Principal Investigator

Alan Kaul

Medical Outcomes Management and Practice Research Network PRACnet

Dr. Alan Kaul is the President of Medical Outcomes Management and the founder and Co-Principal Investigator of Practice Research Network (PRACnet). Over his career Dr. Kaul has served in several leadership roles and is currently a member of the Scientific Steering Committee for the national COVID-19 Research Database. Dr. Kaul has participated in several PCORI-funded research projects including COVID19 Working Group, The Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Network Antibiotics and Childhood Growth Study.

Chief Biostatistician

Miguel Hernán

Harvard School of Public Health

Dr. Hernán is a Kolokotrones Professor of Biostatistics and Epidemiology at Harvard School of Public Health and a world expert in causal inference. Dr. Hernán has developed many of the advanced statistical techniques that will be used in our analysis. He has a long-standing interest in treatment of diabetes and is the author of the PCORI white paper on Antihyperglycemic Therapy and Cardiovascular Risk: Design and Emulation of a Target Trial Using Healthcare Databases as well as a co- investigator of an R01 studying treatment of women with pre-gestational diabetes.

Informatics Lead

Satyender Goel

Medical Outcomes Management

Dr. Goel is a data scientist who has extensive experience working with PCORnet data and infrastructure as well as Datavant privacy-protecting data linkage technology that will be utilized in the proposal. Dr. Goel will supervise all aspects of data processing including data acquisition from the sites, conversion (where needed) of the data to the Common Data Model, data linkage from different sites and computation of all variables for statistical analysis.

Biostatistics Lead

Lucia Petito

Medical Outcomes Management

Dr. Petito is an Assistant Professor of Preventive Medicine (Biostatistics) at Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine and an affiliate of the Biostatistics Collaboration Center. Her research focuses on the application and development of statistical models in epidemiology including causal inference methods, survival analysis and longitudinal analysis.

Diabetes Lead

Marie McDonnell

Mass General Brigham

Dr. Marie McDonnell is Co-Investigator, Chief of the Diabetes Section in the Division of Endocrinology, and Director of the Diabetes Program at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Dr. McDonnell is an expert diabetologist who has co-authored multiple diabetes treatment guidelines, including the Society of Thoracic Surgeons practice guideline on blood glucose management during adult cardiac surgery, the Endocrine Society Guideline on the Management of Diabetes in Older Adults and the Endocrine Society Guideline for Management of Hyperglycemia in the Hospital Setting..

Site Principal Investigators

Ryan Carnahan

University of Iowa College of Public Health, Greater Plains Collaborative

Dr. Carnahan, the Site PI at Greater Plains Collaborative, is a pharmacoepidemiologist specializing in use of secondary data sources. Dr. Carnahan has served as the Co-Lead of the Protocol and Applied Surveillance Core of the Mini-Sentinel and Sentinel Initiatives of the FDA and is a skilled comparative effectiveness investigator.

Vincent Willey

Carelon

Dr. Willey, the Site PI at Carelon, is a Principal Scientist for Carelon with extensive experience in real-world observational studies. Dr. Willey oversees the use of administrative claims and electronic health record data in numerous ongoing Health Economics and Outcomes Research studies and Pragmatic Clinical Trials.

Elisa Priest

Baylor Scott and White Health

Elisa Priest is the System Director, Research Analytics at Baylor Scott & White Research Institute. She is an Epidemiologist with over 20 years of experience and is focused on utilizing electronic health record data for research

M. Cecilia Lansang

Cleveland Clinic

Dr. Lansang, the Site PI at Cleveland Clinic, is Director of Endocrinology, Cleveland Clinic, Main Campus; Chair, Cleveland Clinic Health Systems Diabetes Care Committee; and Professor of Medicine at Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine of the Case Western Reserve University. Dr. Lansang is an experienced diabetologist and investigator.

Stephen Stemkowski

Humana

Stephen Stemkowski, the site PI at Humana is the Director and Principal, Government Research and Consortiums. In his role, he has engaged in health policy and outcomes research, health care analytics, clinical informatics, and quality and performance measurement. His expertise encompasses evaluation research designs, quantitative methods used in primary and secondary observational research and constructing research datasets from clinical and administrative data sources.