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Dr. Wyatt P. Bensken is a research investigator on the OCHIN research team. In this role, Wyatt is the research policy liaison, co-lead of the Quantitative Sciences Core, co-director of the AIM-AHEAD Research Fellowship, and supports the ADVANCE Clinical Research Network (CRN) which is led by OCHIN. Wyatt’s research focuses on using quantitative methods to understand the mechanisms of policies and health care on inequities in care and outcomes among minoritized populations with complex social and medical needs.
Wyatt oversees a variety of studies that use a range of large health care data (e.g., Medicaid claims, administrative discharge data, electronic health records, cancer registry data) independently and integrated together. This work has focused on conditions where the nexus of social and medical needs results in inequities in health and health outcomes including cancer, multimorbidity, and seizures/epilepsy among others. Wyatt’s work has also examined the social drivers of health and their relationship with health and health care utilization. An additional component of Wyatt’s portfolio of work is understanding how health care policies further interact with these social and medical needs to contribute to health care and health outcomes.
Wyatt has received research funding from the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities of the National Institutes of Health and is currently funded by several grants from the National Institutes of Health.
Scientific Appointments
Honors
Social drivers of health, including area-level social drivers of health and individual-level social risks and social needs, influence health and health outcomes. Wyatt has developed a portfolio of work on using large electronic and administrative health data to measure and understand the social drivers of health, social risks, and social needs. In addition to these publications, he has led panel presentations (Health Care Systems Research Network) and delivered oral presentations (National Association of Health Data Organizations, International Conference on Health Policy Statistics, and AcademyHealth) and given invited talks (MetroHealth Population Health and Equity Research Institute) on these topics. Example publications include:
Disparities and inequities in many disabling and neurological conditions have been understudied—hampering health equity efforts. In response to this need, Wyatt led work that combines both traditional statistical approaches as well as novel machine learning techniques to identify inequities among people living with seizures/epilepsy as an exemplar for chronic disabling conditions. To date, this work has identified novel inequities in diagnosis, co-occurring health conditions, specialist care, and pharmacotherapy treatment. This work has uncovered how the confluence of individual-, community-, and structural-level factors influence care and outcomes. Example publications include:
Building upon our conceptualization that two main drivers of disparities are policy and primary care practice, there is a great need to understand the effect of these changes. This work has developed Wyatt’s expertise in understanding the policy- and practice drivers of health. Example publications include:
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