Anastasia Makhanova
University of Arkansas, AR·Psychology
Patients from some social groups receive less consistent medical care, and part of the cause is often traced to individual healthcare providers. Doctors and nurses are people.
- Fields
Psychology
Public Health & Epidemiology
Medicine & Clinical Research
- Topics
clinical decision-making
healthcare disparities
health equity
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through May 2029
What they work on
- Measure how workplace demands such as stress and burnout, concern about one's own health, and inflammation relate to clinicians' performance on standardized decision-making assessments, using a correlational design.
- Test whether experimentally raising inflammation, measured by pro-inflammatory cytokines (immune signaling molecules), to simulate illness makes provider decisions less consistent, in a randomized controlled design.
- Track emergency and hospitalist clinicians for a year, recording illness symptoms, stress, burnout and local infection rates, and link these to the care of abdominal pain patients they treated on the same days.
More about the research
Stress, burnout and even their own illness may weaken their ability to make objective, uniform clinical decisions. Yet it is not well understood which provider conditions compromise decision-making, and that gap makes it hard to design fixes. Drawing on psychology and psychoneuroimmunology, the study of how mental states, the nervous system and the immune system affect one another, this work asks how three adverse provider conditions affect care. These conditions are heavy workplace demands, worry about one's own health, and the inflammation that comes with illness.
Why it matters
Patients from certain social groups, especially those seen for abdominal pain in emergency and hospital settings, could benefit if inconsistencies in their care are reduced. By identifying when provider burnout, illness or inflammation weakens clinical judgment, the findings could point to timely interventions. They could also give hospital administrators evidence on how understaffing and burnout affect the quality of patient care.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Emily Tucker
Clemson University, SC·Engineering
Quantify how staffing strain, patient congestion, pandemic status and demographics relate to well-being and burnout in emergency department clinicians, using generalized linear mixed effects models and factor analysis on survey data from seven sites.
Nina Bickell
Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, NY·Public Health & Epidemiology
Use NYC-wide visit data on 12 million patients to describe how mixed or uniform outpatient practices are by insurance and other factors, and test links to quality measures in pediatric preventive care, obstetric procedures and chronic disease management.
Laura Caccavale
Virginia Commonwealth University, VA·Psychology·Early-career
Test whether the 6-month SHIFT2 transition program improves blood sugar control, measured by HbA1c, compared with enhanced usual care in a randomized trial of 50 people with type 1 diabetes aged 16–22.
The school
University of Arkansas: 12 labs on PI Pages, $231M a year on research, 179 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
A start for your email. Fill in the brackets.