Applied Research & Data Analysis

Meaningful insights can translate ideas into practice, remove care barriers—and improve outcomes. We use community-based, participatory-informed, person-centered, and equity-sensitive mixed-methods research in collaboration with a continuum of stakeholders to help clients close information gaps, make evidence-informed decisions, and deliver better care.

What Challenges You

To ensure programs and services are accessible, equitable, and achieving the best outcomes, health and human services organizations like yours must research and analyze large collections of existing and new data—then meaningfully apply it to operations. Organizations may struggle with the scientific approach and impartiality needed to investigate how policies, programs, and operational performance impact people, communities, and systems and identify data-driven opportunities for improvement.

Why Choose Us

As a part of UMass Chan Medical School, we offer clients access to numerous world-class capabilities, tools, and expertise across several academic and clinical departments. Our in-house Institutional Review Board (IRB) reviews every study to affirm the soundness, ethics, and compliance of our studies. We offer a diversity of perspectives and expertise—clinical, policy, financial, operational, and methodological—with the deep context needed to understand the problem you want to solve, identify the right questions to ask, determine optimal research methods, and translate data into evidence-based solutions.

With the support of our experts, clients can strategically shift priorities to improve outcomes, translate ideas into real-world practices, remove barriers to care access, and identify continuous quality improvement strategies so that they may increase health care and health equity across their members. 

How We Can Help

  1. 1

    With academic rigor, we conduct investigator-initiated qualitative, quantitative, and mixed-methods research on a range of health topics.
  2. 2

    As a “one-stop center” for all healthcare-related research, we help clients move tangibly from problem statements to meaningful programmatic change.
  3. 3

    Our services support population-based research informing prevention, screening, and treatment for at-risk individuals.

Our Impact

Aligning the Right Treatment at the Right Time

For over six years, our team has helped a state Medicaid agency’s behavioral health office better understand the health status and care utilization of certain high-risk populations. For instance, we found that the service costs of individuals with traumatic brain injury have complex care needs whose emergency department behavioral health service costs are typically 10 times higher than general Medicaid members—empowering our client to shift resources toward better care for this population.