Mary Beth Landrum, PhD, is an associate professor of health care policy, with a specialty in biostatistics, in the Department of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Landrum’s primary research focus is on the development and application of statistical methodology for health services research. This research has several related themes, including the development of medical guidelines and the profiling of health care providers. In her work on medical guidelines, she developed an approach for constructing practice guidelines based on expert opinion and then for assessing quality of care according to the extent to which physicians adhered to these guidelines.
Dr. Landrum has also developed and applied methodology for profiling health care providers—in particular, methods for assessing providers on more than one dimension of care. Her work in this area involves examining the relationships among multiple indices of quality, examining the impact of provider characteristics on quality of care when providers are measured on more than one dimension of care, and the estimation of summary quality measures for each provider. She applied these methods to construct composite profiles of inpatient care for patients who have had a recent heart attack and to analyze data from the National Mental Health Program of the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Dr. Landrum is also involved in a number of studies examining patterns and quality of care and their subsequent impact on patient outcomes. Some areas here include comparison of care received following a heart attack among elderly veterans treated in a Veterans Health Administration hospital with care of similar patients treated under Medicare; differences in the use of procedures, medications, and preventive services between heart attack patients with HMO and fee-for-service insurance; quality of HIV care and changes in care subsequent to quality training; and the impact of primary and specialty care on the diagnosis, treatment, and surveillance of elderly patients with breast cancer. She is also collaborating with researchers across the country on a multisite project examining care delivered to newly diagnosed lung and colorectal cancer patients.
Dr. Landrum received her BS degree from MIT and her MS and PhD in biostatistics from the University of Michigan.