What project are you working on?

I’m working on a retrospective EHR study examining whether primary care follow-up after an opioid prescription for acute pain in the emergency department or urgent care is associated with a lower risk of subsequent long-term opioid use. We’re using longitudinal data to follow patients after their initial prescription and characterize subsequent opioid prescribing. We hope to better understand the role of primary care as an intervention point to interrupt potentially harmful prescribing cascades.

What aspect of the project interests you the most?

I’m most interested in the transition from an isolated episode of acute pain to longer-term opioid exposure. I think it’s particularly interesting that something as routine as timely primary care follow-up can potentially create an opportunity for safer pain management.

What has been the most challenging part?

The most challenging part has been translating our clinical question into definitions that can actually be measured using EHR data. Defining acute versus chronic pain, opioid naïveté, longitudinal opioid use, and adequate follow-up has required thinking carefully about both the clinical meaning of these variables and how they appear in real-world data.

What are your research interests and what do you hope to gain with your time at FCMRG?

My research interests are in pain, opioid stewardship, clinical epidemiology, and health data science. During my time at FCMRG, I hope to become familiar with EHR data and other large clinical datasets, develop practical data science skills, and strengthen my foundation in statistics and epidemiologic methods. I hope to become better at developing clinically relevant research questions and translating them into rigorous, feasible study designs.

Fun fact (about you)?

I recently taken up Brazilian Jiu Jitsu!