Bradley Gordon Hammill
Associate Professor in Population Health Sciences

Areas of expertise: Biostatistics, Real-World Data, Health Services Research, Health Policy, and Epidemiology

Current Research Interests

I believe that we can and should leverage electronic health data for clinical research and quality assessment. While not the answer to all questions, real-world data (RWD) like health care claims data and electronic health record (EHR) data contain a wealth of information.

I’m currently working to bring RWD to many different projects:
- FDA Sentinel Initiative: I am responsible for the team that transforms and manages the 100% Medicare and 100% Medicaid claims data, within the CMS Virtual Research Data Center (VRDC), for the Sentinel distributed database. FDA uses this database to monitor its regulated medical products.

- Pragmatic Clinical Trials: I am working with the Data Coordinating Centers for multiple trials to obtain and incorporate RWD for participants into clinical trial databases. This is one way we hope to make trials more pragmatic and lower cost. Good examples of this work include the ADAPTABLE [ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT02697916] and PREVENTABLE [NCT04262206] trials. Both are pragmatic mega-trials relying on RWD for outcomes. Other trials leveraging real-world data that I am or have been involved with include HARMONY [NCT02465515], CEPIO-D [NCT03749629], and PRECIDENTD.

- NIH Cohort Studies: I have partnered with multiple investigators at other universities who run cohort studies sponsored by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute to link Medicare claims data for their study participants. These studies include the Framingham Heart Study, the Strong Heart Study, the Jackson Heart Study, the Cardiovascular Health Study (CHS), and MESA (Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis). 

- Health System Performance: I am working closely with Duke University Health System quality leadership to explore and benchmark performance using the same claims data that CMS, US News & World Report, and other ratings groups rely on.

Of course, for healthcare research, it is not easy to extract value out of RWD. Meaningful, actionable results require rigorous study design, a deep knowledge of data provenance, and appropriate statistical methods. I have a commitment to quality in all of these areas.

Current Appointments & Affiliations

Contact Information

  • 215 Morris St, Suite 210, Durham, NC 27701
  • Duke Box 104023, Durham, NC 27710

Some information on this profile has been compiled automatically from Duke databases and external sources. (Our About page explains how this works.) If you see a problem with the information, please write to Scholars@Duke and let us know. We will reply promptly.