Emerging Applications for Tools to Improve External Validity

SPECIAL SEMINAR

Michael Webster-Clark, Pharm D, PhD

Postdoctoral Researcher
Dept of Epidemiology, Biostatistics & Occupational Health
SPGH | McGill University

WHERE: In-Person | 2001 McGill College, Rm 1201 | Zoom

Abstract

Historically, discussion of external validity in population health has typically been limited to saying “these results may not be generalizable” in the discussion section of academic papers. More recently, the increasing availability of real-world data has led to the development of analytic tools that estimate treatment effects while accounting for differences between study and target populations. This talk will focus on some less obvious ways these tools can help improve population health research. These include expanding our understanding of differences in adherence between trials and real-world populations; lending clarity to effect estimates from multi-site studies that rely on meta-analysis; and increasing the precision of safety and effectiveness estimates in specific types of subgroups.

Speaker Bio

Dr. Michael Webster-Clark is a post-doctoral researcher at the McGill Department of Epidemiology, Biostatistics, and Occupational Health where he conducts epidemiologic methods research with a focus on analytic approaches to external validity that estimate treatment effects in specific target populations, including the application of these approaches to distributed networks. He hopes to make accounting for threats to external validity for specific target populations as well-understood and commonplace as adjusting for confounding in observational studies.