Her research examines factors that are biologically separate from cancer but that are nonetheless important determinants of its presentation, diagnosis, treatment, and mortality. In this research, she strives to be innovative in at least two broad ways: first, by focusing on nonmalignant factors that affect malignant disease course; and second, by privileging a life-course perspective in oncology, thus examining the full trajectory of cancer, from screening for an illness to death.
Her prior work includes a series of methodologic validation studies of Medicare claims as part of an NCI-funded career award entitled Do Medicare Claims Measure Chemotherapy Use and Outcome?. The work was motivated by the underrepresentation of the elderly on cancer clinical trials, and thus the need for valid observational data with which to study chemotherapy use and outcomes in the population of elderly cancer patients to inform clinical care and health care policy. Through three related projects, she determined the validity of Medicare claims at capturing critical elements of anticancer therapy: chemotherapy administration, chemotherapy-related toxicities, and disease-free survival.
Results of this validation work are currently being applied to two distinct collaborative projects that require evaluation of administrative health care claims to estimate chemotherapy use and outcome. The first project is a Department of Health Care Policy–based evaluation of the quality of cancer care provided to veterans with cancer by the Veterans Administration health care system. The second project represents a cross-Harvard collaboration, with investigators from Harvard Medical School, the Harvard School of Public Health, and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences evaluating the importance of social and health care context (i.e., environment) on the full trajectory of cancer, from onset through death.
Dr. Lamont chairs the Health Services Research subcommittee of the NCI-sponsored cooperative clinical trial group Cancer and Leukemia Group B and thus oversees this research agenda. She is also on the editorial boards of Palliative Medicine and Pharos. Dr. Lamont received her MD from Dartmouth Medical School, and her MS in health studies from the Pritzker School of Medicine at the University of Chicago. She was a medicine resident at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and a medical oncology fellow at the University of Chicago.