Sharon-Lise Normand, Ph.D. , is Professor of Health Care Policy (Biostatistics) in the Department of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School and in the Department of Biostatistics at the Harvard School of Public Health. Dr. Normand's research focuses on the development of statistical methods for health services research, primarily using Bayesian approaches to problem solving, including assessment of quality of care, methods for causal inference, provider profiling, meta-analysis, and latent variable modeling. She has developed a long line of research on methods for the analysis of patterns of treatment and quality of care for patients with cardiovascular disease and with mental disorders. Dr. Normand has developed analytic approaches for comparing providers using outcomes and process-based measures, and for determining the appropriate unit of analysis, e.g., hospital-level or physician-level analysis. She is the Director of Mass-DAC, the data-coordinating center responsible for collecting, analyzing, and reporting on the quality of care for adults discharged following a cardiac procedure from all hospitals in Massachusetts . Dr. Normand and colleagues annually report on hospital performance as well as physicians using medical-record data. She is also the senior statistician in a 6,000 patient trial in Massachusetts to examine the effectiveness and safety of performing elective angioplasty at hospitals without surgery on site with that performed at hospitals with surgery on site. Dr. Normand is participating in two NIMH-funded studies to expand inferences using observational data. This work involves extending and applying methods for making causal inference in both the experimental and observational settings. The methods involve propensity scores and instrumental variables techniques, and are used to learn about treatment effectiveness and about innovation or exnovation of treatments. Methods are applied in cohorts of patients with major depression, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia. Working with investigators from the School of Public Health , Dr. Normand is developing methods for analyzing non-commensurate data (data on different measurement scales) using likelihood and quasi-likelihood approaches. This work is illustrated in understanding policy changes in the delivery of mental health care where multiple outcomes are reported. Dr. Normand earned her A.B. and M.S. degrees in statistics from the University of Western Ontario and her Ph.D. in biostatistics from the University of Toronto . She is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association as well as a Fellow of the American College of Cardiology. She is a member of the Massachusetts Cardiac Care Advisory Commission, serves on task forces for the American Heart Association and the American College of Cardiology, and is a member of the FDA's Circulatory Systems Devices Advisory Panel.

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