Hallie C. Prescott, MD, MSc
Associate Professor, Pulmonary & Critical Care Medicine, Internal Medicine
734-936-5047
Dr. Hallie Prescott is a member of the Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine. She graduated from Middlebury College with a B.A. in Molecular Biology. She completed medical school and Internal Medicine residency training at The Ohio State University, where she also served as chief medical resident. In 2011, she was recruited to University of Michigan for Pulmonary & Critical Care Medicine fellowship. In 2014, Hallie completed her fellowship training and graduated with a Master’s of Science in Health & Healthcare Research.
Hallie conducts health services research to understand and improve the long-term outcomes of acute medical illnesses. Her initial focus is reducing the need for repeated hospitalization after severe sepsis. She has found that the rate of hospitalization following severe sepsis exceeds patients’ baseline rate of hospitalization as well as that of carefully matched controls. Furthermore, in more recent work published in JAMA, Hallie has found that 42% of hospitalizations in the 90 days after sepsis occur for potentially preventable conditions—recurrent sepsis, less severe infection, heart failure, etc.
In addition to her research in Medicare beneficiaries, Hallie has also partnered with investigators at Kaiser Permanente to examine hospital readmissions and healthcare utilization of sepsis survivors within Kaiser’s integrated healthcare delivery system. After accounting for the differences in age between the Medicare and Kaiser cohorts, the findings were remarkably similar between these cohorts. The consistent findings across studies demonstrates the pervasiveness of re-hospitalization and new morbidity after sepsis.
While much of the current research on re-hospitalization focuses whether or not readmission penalties are “fair” to hospitals, Hallie’s work focuses on how to improve outcomes for patients.
Hallie’s work draws on the tools of health services research, “big data” analytics, and implementation science. Her K08 will build the foundation for future translational research to uncover the biologic mechanisms of long-term morbidity post-sepsis and for future clinical interventions to improve the recovery and reduce healthcare utilization of severe sepsis survivors.