Massachusetts Eye and Ear Clinical Profile

Massachusetts Eye and Ear Research Profile

Harvard Catalyst Profile

During her first three years as clinical faculty at MEE, Dr. Lorch concomitantly pursued a Master’s in Public Health with a concentration in Clinical Effectiveness at the Harvard School of Public Health in order to obtain more formal training in biostatistics and epidemiology to support her interest in healthcare outcomes and quality. She has grant funding from Alcon, DCFU, ECOCH and United Against Racism (UAR) to support the development of a community health center-based program for ophthalmic screening and care that is currently active in three MGB community health locations in Boston and has already increased screening rates for diabetic retinopathy in those locations by 12-23%. This program will expand to 10-15 locations across MGB using AI-equipped technology over the next two years.

Alongside her work with quality data internal to her department, she was selected nationally by the American Academy of Ophthalmology as co-PI (with HMS Department of Ophthalmology Chair Joan W. Miller, MD, FACS, David Glendenning Cogan Professor) to pursue research on the newly developed IRIS (Intelligent Research in Sight) Registry. Only four academic centers in the country were awarded exclusive access to this large registry, which is comprised of approximately 250 million encounters and 45 million patients. Dr. Lorch oversees a team of biostatisticians and programmers and collaborates with epidemiologists on this project, to guide projects on national ophthalmic outcomes.