Research at a glance

In provider profiling, Professor Normand has developed innovative statistical approaches  for assessing and comparing the quality of care delivered by hospitals and clinicians. Her research accounts for differences across patient populations and institutional practices, supporting more meaningful and equitable comparisons that inform public reporting and policy initiatives.

Professor Normand has advanced the field of causal inference with novel methods tailored for complex health care data and systems. Her work addresses the realities of confounding, multiple treatment options, and heterogeneity, resulting in robust methodologies that are now widely adopted in comparative effectiveness research and health policy evaluation. She continues to play a key role in the development of modern analytic tools in this domain.

Through highly influential work in meta-analysis, Professor Normand has expanded the field’s methodological toolkit, enabling more precise and reliable synthesis of complex and incomplete evidence. Her research addresses issues such as rare adverse events, incomplete data, and heterogeneous study designs, enabling more reliable and interpretable conclusions. These advances are widely applied in clinical investigations and health policy settings, and have set new standards for reporting and interpreting meta-analytic findings, directly impacting the quality and transparency of evidence in medicine and health policy.

In the area of health care quality, Professor Normand’s research examines variations in outcomes such as mortality and readmission rates, offering frameworks to evaluate performance at the hospital and system level. Her work informs the development of benchmarks, accountability tools, and national quality standards, as well as efforts to reduce disparities in care. 

Professor Normand’s research on serious mental illness addresses patterns of care, utilization, and persistent disparities for people with conditions such as schizophrenia. Her studies highlight the role of race, ethnicity, and geography in influencing access to evidence-based treatment and guide ongoing efforts to improve equity and outcomes for vulnerable populations.