Heather Yeo

Health services research is a multidisciplinary field that focuses on improving the quality, efficiency, and effectiveness of healthcare services. Within health services research, our group at the Yeo Lab has three focus areas:  

As new technological capabilities emerge, our team seeks to understand how these advancements can be used to improve health services for both providers and patients. Our projects in this area have ranged from the creation of a mobile health app that aids in patient post-operative monitoring to developing an electronic health record-based notification system for physicians.  

While the U.S. population has grown increasingly diverse, percentages of women and minority medical school graduates and surgical faculty have not kept pace. Our research aims to reduce these workforce disparities by identifying best practices in the retention and promotion of women and minority faculty and trainees in surgery. We have studied disparities in surgical training for 16 years and are the only group to have successfully tracked an entire cohort of U.S. surgical trainees for over a decade. 

Our group focuses on improving outcomes and reducing barriers for patients suffering from long-term illness. We aim to elucidate population disparities in healthcare access, treatment, and delivery. In addition to identifying differences in these areas, we also focus on the characterization of social, economic, and historical factors that contribute to the persistence of these issues. Our team believes that by considering both clinical and social contexts, interventions will be more successful in addressing population-specific disparities.