In the intensive care unit (ICU), quick decision-making can save a life. For Thomas Valley, MD, MSc, visiting associate professor of medicine and director of the Center for Advancing Lung and Intensive Care Outcomes (CALICO) in the division of pulmonary, allergy, and critical care medicine at the University of Colorado Anschutz School of Medicine, these decisions also provoke research questions.
Frustrations that challenge him when he’s taking care of patients in the ICU transform into the bedrock of his research as he studies how to improve the delivery of critical care.
“It was the problems that bothered me that led me down the path to try and improve that system or process of how we make those decisions,” Valley says.
Valley recently joined the Adult and Child Center for Outcomes Research and Delivery Science (ACCORDS) as director of the newly created Secondary Resource Data core to further his mission of practice-driven innovation.
ICU patient trajectories can be non-linear and difficult to predict, creating challenges around care as well as communication with a patient’s family. One of Valley’s first large-scale projects involved creating a decision aid for clinicians to use when deciding whether a patient should be referred to the ICU for more acute care.
What began as a search to create a decision aid for clinicians highlighted the unpredictable nature of critical illness to Valley. Other factors – for example, if a hospital has a limited number of ICU beds – revealed a new insight in his research.
“Deciding if a patient should go to the ICU depends almost as much on the hospital and its resources as it does on the individual patient,” Valley says.
That realization marked a critical point for Valley and paved the way for his focus to move from individual patients to the systems that shape their experiences.
“Over the years, my research has moved further from ‘let’s make an individual decision for one patient’ and more toward ‘let’s see how we can improve and organize critical care more broadly,’” he says.
Valley’s career shift to improving entire care systems by emphasizing how hospital context and resources shape outcomes is one reason he’s excited to join the innovative research happening on the CU Anschutz campus and make an impact with his leadership as director of the newly created Secondary Data Resource core at ACCORDS.
“I’m really excited about the potential for the Secondary Data Resource core, primarily because there are so many strengths in health services research at the University of Colorado,” Valley says.
These strengths center on increasing the robust secondary data resources available across the CU Anschutz campus. By combining data from various sources, like electronic health records and administrative claims, researchers can better understand what works and apply those insights more quickly in real-world settings.
Access to secondary resource data, especially for early-career researchers, is transformative and what Valley calls a “game changer.”
Valley’s initial priorities for the Secondary Data Resource core include expanding datasets, reducing barriers preventing researchers from accessing data, and providing analytical expertise, with an emphasis on making research more efficient, accessible, and rigorous.
“My hope is to build an infrastructure where all CU Anschutz researchers have access to secondary data at their fingertips to ask these questions quickly and develop the expertise so we can ask those questions as well,” Valley says. “Ultimately, that means better care for patients.”
CU Anschutz researchers interested in accessing the Secondary Data Resource should request a consultation.