Mentor
Research Focus:
- Clinical Therapeutics
- Population Health, Epidemiology and Biostatistics
- Health Services and Policy Research
Affiliations:
- MD, PharmD, MSc, FRCP(C)
- Director, Division of Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics
- Professor, Division of Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics, Department of Medicine
- Active Medical Staff, Hamilton Health Sciences and St Joseph ‘s Healthcare Hamilton
- Senior Scientist, Center for Evaluation of Medicines
Biography
Education and Professional Standing
Dr Holbrook is the Director of the Division of Clinical Pharmacology, Department of Medicine, McMaster University; Professor, Department of Medicine, McMaster University and Senior Scientist, Centre for Evaluation of Medicines, St. Joseph’s Healthcare Hamilton. She trained in clinical pharmacy, clinical pharmacology, medicine, internal medicine and clinical epidemiology at the University of Toronto, Philadelphia College, McGill University and McMaster University.
She is an Active Medical Staff member of Hamilton Health Sciences and St Joseph ‘s Healthcare Hamilton, leading an internal medicine and clinical pharmacology teaching service specializing in the management of complex, hospitalized adults with multiple diagnoses, multiple medications, drug-related harms or intolerances, or medication access issues.
She is one of the most senior drug policy expert advisors in the country, having advised governments and public payers at the federal, provincial and regional levels for several decades on comparative effectiveness, safety and cost-effectiveness of medications. Decisions taken currently influence more than $10 billion worth of medication expenditures annually.
Research Interests
Dr. Holbrook’s main research area is evidence-based therapeutics, with current or recent studies on personalizing benefit:harm information for individual patients, cost-related nonadherence, patient preferences for high impact drugs using decision aids, evaluation of ePrescribing interfaces and quality of prescribing, randomized trials of computerized decision support, study of drug use, outcomes and interactions using large administrative health databases, use of systematic review and GRADEPRo to inform clinical practice guidelines.
She is the recipient of a Career Investigator award from the Canadian Institutes for Health Research for innovation in decision-making for patients, practitioners, and policy makers. She remains the Prinicipal Investigator of Canada’s original electronic medical record research network (COMPETE) which develops, implements, and evaluates various e-health initiatives directed at improving the quality of therapeutics.
