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Cancer Outcomes Research Program – Areas of Research

Quality of Cancer Care Delivery

Quality and value of care are increasingly important to health administrators and payers, raising the profile and opportunities for research. UNC investigators are broadly engaged in research related to: development, testing, and implementation of quality/performance metrics; developing and evaluating care enhancements; interacting with health systems and payers related to evolving payment models; applied research and implementation science efforts within the UNC and other health systems; development of innovative informatics approaches and platforms.

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Comparative Effectiveness Research

UNC is a leader in methods for aggregating large datasets, and for leveraging these datasets in high-quality analyses reporting on patterns of care, effectiveness and safety of cancer treatments and care processes. The UNC Lineberger CIPHR resource houses large linked datasets from administrative and clinical sources and provides analytic support to investigators.

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Decision Sciences and Economics

Multiple UNC investigators are leaders in systems science, decision science, and economic evaluations. There are multiple interdisciplinary collaborations across UNC schools in these areas with methodological resources available for studies.

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Patient-Reported Outcomes

UNC is an international leader in the development, testing and implementation of PROs in multiple contexts, including cancer drug development, quality of care, and real-world routine care. Methods expertise in psychometrics, clinical informatics, data visualization, implementation science, and EMR integration provide a rich multidisciplinary environment for research in this area.

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Health Disparities/Equity

There is a longstanding tradition at UNC in the areas of health equity and disparities research, encompassing work in large cohort studies, analyses of linked databases, and prospective intervention studies to narrow gaps in care. This work has particularly focused on racial disparities and urban/rural disparities in cancer care, disparities across the state of North Carolina, and testing of interventions to narrow these disparities.

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Clinical Informatics

Development of novel technology and information flow strategies in oncology are a focus of multiple research programs including EMR-based communication and monitoring; enhanced patient engagement; visualization approaches; and dynamic feedback to support communication and decision making.

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Implementation Science

UNC is a longstanding leader in implementation science methods and applied research spanning numerous areas and disciplines with close connections to the NCI and other cancer centers. Implementation science is a cross-cutting area which is integrated across multiple programs.

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