Dr. Brent Hollenbeck, M.D.
Health services research encompasses a wide-range of study concentrating on how a variety of pressures, both internal and external to the health care system, impact the delivery of care. Dr. Hollenbeck’s interests in this realm focus on how these influences affect the effectiveness of the care provided, and ultimately, the quality of care imparted at the population level.
Variation in physician practice is fueled, in large part,
by a lack of empiricism to guide clinical practice. Ideally, clinical trials
would provide a roadmap to guide the optimal use of health care services.
However, for most diseases, definitive randomized clinical trials are lacking,
and unlikely for practical reasons (e.g., expense, sample size constraints).
With such guidance lacking, physicians turn to anecdote, colleagues, and
medical theory.
For these reasons, delineating best practices will require observational
data. The central theme of my research is to understand physician practice
variation and its relationship to both primary (e.g., mortality)
and secondary (e.g., health-related quality-of-life) outcomes.
Because physicians generally do not practice medicine “in a box”,
my research is also devoted to understanding how a variety of external forces
(e.g., financial incentives) influence their practice styles.
Figure. Conceptual model relationships between variation and
outcome
Using observational data, the goal of my research is to identify practices
that, when implemented on a population level, lead to substantial improvements
in health care quality. Further, my research will elucidate physician
practices that are unnecessary thereby improving the efficiency of health
care delivery.
