Past Award Winners – Marshall Joffe Epidemiologic Methods Research Award

In 1991, I migrated to promoting trials of policy and programs in British Columbia PharmaCare, inspired by Tom Chalmers’s 40 years of randomizing. That led to a long collaboration with Sebastian Schneeweiss including my continuation as an Adjunct Professor at Harvard until 2016. Drug policy studies led me to meet pharmacoepidemiologists in Odense, Denmark, who were planning case-crossover studies, notably Jesper Hallas with whom I continue to work, including clarifying parallels between case-crossover and symmetry analysis. On leave from PharmaCare, 2002-2006, as Professor at University of Victoria’s School of Health Information Science (thanks to a career award from BC’s Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research), I helped create a BC node in Murray’s Stroke Onset Study. In 2007, SER invited me to run for president, which gave me a podium in 2009 to urge epidemiologists to be leaders against climate change.

Murray’s application of case-crossover methods to study healthcare worker injuries gave me confidence to compete for a Professorship entitled BC Chair in Patient Safety, endowed by the Ministry of Health in the Dept of Anesthesiology, Pharmacology and Therapeutics at UBC. From 2009-2012, my Professorship encompassed my government position as Director of Research and Evidence Development in PharmaCare. In those years, with David Madigan’s FDA-sponsored Working Group on Case Only Designs (2011), I worked out many similarities and several key differences between case-crossover and self-controlled case series designs for drug safety monitoring. In 2012, my initiative in promoting policy-relevant research triggered my involuntary oscillation back to full-time academe (7 staff were fired for taking initiative that new bosses didn’t understand) until the Ministry apologized and rehired me as Research Scholar in Residence (2018-2020) to develop rapid-evaluation with Designed Delays (control groups).

In the interim, with Andy Carson-Stevens, a patient safety activist in Wales, I developed a plan to apply case-crossover methods to routine adverse event reporting in hospitals but our progress has been slow. In 2016, I joined Suzanne Cadarette’s Self-controlled Crossover Observational PharmacoEpidemiology (SCOPE) Group in producing guidance (‘Control Yourself’, in press) and tools (forthcoming) for case-crossover, self-controlled case series and symmetry analyses. Through Will Dixon’s ‘Cloudy with a Chance of Pain’ Study in Manchester UK (2017-19), I have become excited about emerging opportunities for self-controlled analyses of data from smart phones. I see these as platforms for potential n-of-1 studies in diverse domains. Meanwhile I focus on improving quality of quality improvement methods: surgical quality outcome reports and pragmatic trials of audit-and-feedback to family physicians using ‘prescribing portraits’ made by Colin Dormuth’s Pharmacoepidemiology Group in the Therapeutics Initiative at UBC.”