Susan Shortreed, PhD

“By using rich data sources such as electronic health records, we can begin to identify which treatments will work best for which people.”

Susan M. Shortreed, PhD

Senior Biostatistics Investigator, Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute
Affiliate Professor, Department of Biostatistics, University of Washington

Susan.M.Shortreed@kp.org
206-287-2088

Curriculum vitae (CV)

Biography

Susan Shortreed, PhD, uses statistics and machine learning methods to address health science problems, with a special emphasis on analyzing complex longitudinal data. She develops and evaluates statistical approaches for observational data, and works to improve the design and analyses of studies that use data collected from electronic health care records. She is leading a project to develop statistical methods for constructing personalized treatment strategies using data captured from electronic health records.

Dr. Shortreed earned her PhD in statistics from the University of Washington. Then she spent two years in the Department of Epidemiology and Preventive Medicine at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, and two years in the School of Computer Science at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. Dr. Shortreed has collaborated with scientists in a broad range of areas including alcohol use, cancer screening, and medication safety. She now works alongside researchers in mental and behavioral health, evaluating and comparing treatments for chronic pain and depression, and interventions to prevent suicide. Dr. Shortreed is an investigator with the Mental Health Research Network, designing studies to address important public health concerns, such as determining which antidepressant medications work best for which patients and developing risk prediction algorithms to identify individuals who may be at increased risk for suicidal behavior.

Dr. Shortreed is also an affiliate professor of biostatistics at the University of Washington School of Public Health. She served on the executive board for the American Statistical Association’s Section on Statistics in Epidemiology and the editorial board of the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series C: Applied Statistics.

Research interests and experience

Biostatistics

Design and analysis of studies that use data collected from electronic health records; analysis of complex longitudinal data; methods for constructing personalized treatment strategies, computational statistics and algorithms; machine learning; variable selection methods.

Medication Use & Patient Safety

Biostatistics; machine learning; using data collected from electronic health records to study rare adverse events; opioid safety; medication safety in pregnancy.
Mental Health

Biostatistics; treatment for chronic depression; suicide prevention; developing personalized treatment strategies; developing risk prediction models.

Recent publications

Simon GE, Rossom RC, Iturralde E, Ahmedani BK, Waring SC, Owen-Smith AA, Sterling SA, Miley K, Stults CD, Daida YG, Lynch FL, Beck A, Sanchez K, Coleman KJ, Shortreed SM. Clozapine use among people with psychotic disorders who experience specific indications for clozapine. J Clin Psychiatry. 2024 Apr 29;85(2):23m14833. doi: 10.4088/JCP.23m14833. PubMed

Bian Z, Moodie EEM, Shortreed SM, Lambert SD, Bhatnagar S. Variable selection for individualised treatment rules with discrete outcomes. J R Stat Soc Ser C Appl Stat. 2023 Nov 2;73(2):298-313. doi: 10.1093/jrsssc/qlad096. eCollection 2024. PubMed

Simon GE, Johnson E, Shortreed SM, Ziebell RA, Rossom RC, Ahmedani BK, Coleman KJ, Beck A, Lynch FL, Daida YG. Predicting suicide death after emergency department visits with mental health or self-harm diagnoses. Gen Hosp Psychiatry. 2024 Jan 22;87:13-19. doi: 10.1016/j.genhosppsych.2024.01.009. [Epub ahead of print]. PubMed

Ralston JD, Anderson M, Ng J, Bashir A, Ehrlich K, Burns-Hunt D, Cotton M, Hansell L, Hsu C, Hunt H, Karter AJ, Levy SM, Ludman E, Madziwa L, Omura EM, Rogers K, Sevey B, Shaw JAM, Shortreed SM, Singh U, Speight J, Sweeny A, Tschernisch K, Sergei Tschernisch S, Yarborough L. Preventing severe hypoglycemia in adults with type 2 diabetes (PHT2): Design, delivery and evaluation framework for a randomized controlled trial. Contemp Clin Trials. 2024 Jan 20;139:107456. doi: 10.1016/j.cct.2024.107456. [Epub ahead of print]. PubMed

Simon GE, Shortreed SM, Johnson E, Yaseen ZS, Stone M, Mosholder AD, Ahmedani BK, Coleman KJ, Coley RY, Penfold RB, Toh S. Predicting risk of suicidal behavior from insurance claims data vs. linked data from insurance claims and electronic health records. Pharmacoepidemiol Drug Saf. 2023 Dec 19. doi: 10.1002/pds.5734. [Epub ahead of print]. PubMed

Simon GE, Cruz M, Boggs JM, Beck A, Shortreed SM, Coley RY. Predicting outcomes of antidepressant treatment in community practice settings. Psychiatr Serv. 2023 Dec 5:appips20230380. doi: 10.1176/appi.ps.20230380. [Epub ahead of print]. PubMed

Moodie EEM, Bian Z, Coulombe J, Lian Y, Yang AY, Shortreed SM. Variable selection in high dimensions for discrete-outcome individualized treatment rules: Reducing severity of depression symptoms. Biostatistics. 2023 Aug 31:kxad022. doi: 10.1093/biostatistics/kxad022. Online ahead of print. PubMed

Simon GE, Cruz M, Shortreed SM, Sterling SA, Coleman KJ, Ahmedani BK, Yaseen ZS, Mosholder AD. Stability of suicide risk prediction models during changes in health care delivery. Psychiatr Serv. 2023 Aug 17:0. doi: 10.1176/appi.ps.20230172. [Epub ahead of print]. PubMed

Schulz J, Moodie EEM, Shortreed SM. No unmeasured confounding: Known unknowns or... not? Am J Epidemiol. 2023 Jun 6;kwad133. doi: 10.1093/aje/kwad133. Online ahead of print. PubMed

Bian Z, Moodie EEM, Shortreed SM, Bhatnagar S. Variable selection in regression-based estimation of dynamic treatment regimes. Biometrics. 2023 Jun;79(2):988-999. doi: 10.1111/biom.13608. Epub 2021 Dec 18. PubMed