Featuring Wesley Marrero, Dartmouth College

Abstract: The increasing availability of healthcare data has provided a great opportunity to develop data-driven models to guide health policy and medical practice. This talk aims to present new methods that use these data to make better healthcare decisions at a population and patient level. I will first give an overview of my team’s previous and current work on opioid use disorder, organ transplantation, and mental health. Subsequently, I will present modeling approaches to consider the intuition or preferences of physicians and their patients in implementing treatment protocols. To illustrate how these methods can be implemented in medical practice, my team and I found interpretable and flexible antihypertensive treatment choices for over 16 million adults in the US. This research has the potential to improve healthcare practice by giving achievable guidelines to policymakers and medical professionals based on patient and population-level data.

Bio: Professor Marrero’s research interest lies in developing decision-support tools that consider the challenges associated with their implementation in practice, such as inequity, irrational behavior, lack of interpretability, and need for flexibility. To this end, he designs and applies techniques from operations research and statistics, with an emphasis on simulation and optimization. His current work addresses various application areas, including cardiovascular disease, mental health, opioid use disorder, and organ transplantation. Through this research, Dr. Marrero has ongoing collaborations with Dartmouth Health, the Geisel School of Medicine, the Massachusetts General Hospital, the University of Michigan Medical School and School of Public Health, and the New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services.