Meeting Calendar

Upcoming events

9/25/2026

Friday 1:30-2:45pm, 

Place: Genome Cafe, Room E3609

Light lunch 1:10-1:30pm

Zoom link: https://jh.zoom.us/my/wange3614?omn=97743257611

Title: Scaling Real-World Evidence in Critical Care: A Federated Clone-Censor-Weight Framework for Target Trial Emulation

Speaker: Yicheng Shen, PhD Student, Department of Biostatistics, Johns Hopkins University

Abstract:

Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) remain the gold standard for clinical evidence, but they often cannot address the full range of urgent treatment decisions encountered in critical care, where patients are severely ill, care pathways evolve rapidly, and treatment must be initiated under substantial uncertainty. Target trial emulation (TTE) provides a principled framework for using observational data to estimate causal effects in a manner aligned with randomized trial design, but valid implementation requires careful handling of treatment timing, confounding, and heterogeneity. We propose a federated TTE framework for multicenter longitudinal electronic health record data that estimates treatment effects without pooling patient-level records. The framework uses clone-censor-weighting (CCW) to address immortal time bias from treatment grace periods and incorporates negative control outcomes to calibrate residual bias due to unmeasured confounding. Participating sites fit nuisance models locally and transmit only aggregate summary statistics to an analysis center for overall effect estimation while preserving patient confidentiality. We demonstrate the framework within the Common Longitudinal ICU data Format (CLIF) consortium by emulating a target trial for severe community-acquired pneumonia. Our approach provides a scalable framework for generating credible, privacy-preserving, multi-site real-world evidence relevant to comparative effectiveness research, clinical guideline development, and health policy.

10/23/2026

Youngjoo Cho, Associate Professor, Department of Applied Statistics, Konkuk University

11/6/2026

Rajeshwari Sundaram, Senior Investigator, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, National Institutes of Health