Elizabeth B. Lamont, MD, MS, is a medical oncologist at Massachusetts General Hospital and an assistant professor of medicine and health care policy at Harvard Medical School. Her main academic endeavor is research in clinical epidemiology and health services research in cancer.
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 three distinct collaborative projects that require evaluation of administrative health care claims to estimate chemotherapy use and outcome. The first project, Study of Cancer Care in the Veteran's Administration, 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, Neighborhood Effects on Cancer Course in the Aged, 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. The third project, Population-Based Assessment of Cancer Trial Generalizability in the Elderly, represents a collaboration between HMS, two Harvard hospitals (i.e., MGH and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute), and the NCI Cancer and Leukemia Group B (CALGB) cooperative trial group focused on estimating survival outcomes of elderly Medicare cancer patients following treatment with what can be considered standard chemotherapy regimens and, thus, seeks to begin to fill the large void in clinical knowledge regarding the effectiveness of chemotherapy in elderly Medicare patients.
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, and her MS in Health Studies from the University of Chicago. She was a medicine resident at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and was a medical oncology fellow, medical ethics fellow, and a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar at the University of Chicago. From 2000-2003 she was on the faculty of Medicine at the University of Chicago.
Learn more about Dr. Lamont's work by viewing the following featured news article on 2/6/09 and news briefs on 5/21/08, 4/12/07.