About Us

Our work is funded through various mechanisms, including Federal grants, philanthropic societies, industry grants and contracts, industry partnerships, patient and family donations, and local institutional support. We are always open to conversations about new opportunities and projects in our areas of interest and expertise, including cancer-related health services research, health economics and outcomes research (HEOR), real-world evidence (RWE) and “big data,” patient experience and patient-reported outcomes (PRO), retrospective studies, registries, administrative claims data analysis, and more.

We strive to foster a work environment characterized by inclusivity, generativity, collaboration, and excellence. Learners are an important part of this, and we often have students, housestaff, and post-docs partnering with us on projects. We enjoy working with other teams across the institution both here at Duke, and beyond. The patient voice is at the center of all that we do.


Our Goals

  • Establish an electronic patient-reported outcomes (ePRO) database that facilitates the integration of PROs into the electronic medical record (EMR) for use in routine care, thereby creating a research database/infrastructure while simultaneously improving care.
  • Enhance our ability to extract more meaningful data from the EMR in a simplified manner, to better facilitate projects and improve agility in addressing unanswered questions, at lower cost and in less time.
  • Utilize innovative technology to develop tools that improve patients’ and caregivers’ understanding of an illness and to facilitate shared decision-making between physicians, patients, caregivers, and other clinicians (for example, shared decision-making tools or “decision aids”).
  • Conduct research in a “living laboratory” and translate these ideas into practice via local experiences in the Duke Cancer Institute (DCI), allowing for more expedited development, testing, and refinement of novel interventions to improve patients’ lives.