Joshua Stein

As a board-certified ophthalmologist and glaucoma specialist, I have more than 15 years of clinical experience caring for patients with different types and complexities of glaucoma. In addition to my clinical experience, as a health services researcher, I have developed experience and expertise in several disciplines including performing analyses using large health care claims databases to study utilization and outcomes of patients with ocular diseases, racial and other disparities in eye care, associations between systemic conditions or medication use and ocular diseases. I have learned the nuances of various data sources and ways to maximize our use of these data sources to answer important and timely questions. Leveraging my background in HSR with new skills in bioinformatics and precision medicine, over the past 2-3 years I have been developing and growing the Sight Outcomes Research Collaborative (SOURCE) repository, a powerful tool that researchers can tap into to study patients with ocular diseases. My team and I have spent countless hours devising ways of extracting electronic health record data from Clarity, cleaning and de-identifying the data, and making it linkable to ocular diagnostic test data (OCT, HVF, biometry) and non-clinical data. Now that we have successfully developed such a resource here at Kellogg, I am now collaborating with colleagues at > 2 dozen academic ophthalmology departments across the country to assist them with extracting their data in the same format and sending it to Kellogg so that we can pool the data and make it accessible to researchers at all of the participating centers for research and quality improvement studies. I am also actively exploring ways to integrate data from SOURCE into deep learning and artificial intelligence algorithms, making use of SOURCE data for genotype-phenotype association studies and development of polygenic risk scores for common ocular diseases, capturing patient-reported outcome data for the majority of eye care recipients, enhancing visualization of the data on easy-to-access dashboards to aid in quality improvement initiatives, and making use of the data to enhance quality of care, safety, efficiency of care delivery, and to improve clinical operations. .