Eric Leo Eisenstein

Research Interests:

Dr. Eisenstein is a member of the Duke Clinical Research Institute’s Outcomes Research and Assessment Group, with a special interest in understanding the relationships between complex interventions in health care systems and the long-term clinical and economic outcomes of patients. He has served as Principal Investigator for phase II, III, and IV economic and quality of life studies conducted alongside randomized clinical trials in cardiovascular, emergency, pulmonary, and vascular medicine and surgery. He also has conducted health technology evaluations making use of innovative research methods designed to better understand key relationships in observation (non-randomized) patient data. This work has included evaluations of the long-term clinical outcomes of coronary artery disease patients receiving drug-eluting vs. bare metal intracoronary stents, and how the use of clopidogrel changes those relationships. He also has conducted several studies assessing factors contributing to the costs of and evaluating different design considerations for multi-center randomized clinical trials.

In addition to his working in traditional health technology evaluation, Dr. Eisenstein has an interest in evaluating information technologies as interventions in health care systems. In this regard, he has collaborated in the design and conduct of large-scale, randomized clinical trials to evaluate clinical decision support systems. The research objective in these studies has been to develop methods for evaluating health information technologies in practice-based settings using a “tool kit” of inexpensive, yet highly scalable methods that make use of data sets created as a byproduct of normal clinical and administrative operations. The use of these evaluation methods has been demonstrated in four clinical trials that include care process, clinical, economic, and quality of life measurements.