The Stanford Neurosurgical Outcomes Laboratory aims to analyze and solve healthcare problems relating to neurosurgical and spine care on a population level. Through the development of algorithms that can be applied to various large national and state-level healthcare datasets, our goal is to harness big data to:

1. Understand how quality in neurosurgical and spinal care can be defined in both short and long-term measures
2. Develop appropriate measures of quality neurosurgical and spine care
3. Create benchmarks for care in neurosurgery and spine surgery
4. Create multivariate bio-statistical models of pre-operative, peri-operative and post-operative factors and long term patient outcomes
5. Understand how existing paradigms in neurosurgical and spinal care may be modified to improve patient outcomes

In addition to our population level research, our laboratory has been a national pioneer in integrating prospective outcomes driven medical informative and database systems into the electronic health record. This allows us to identify pre- and post-operative treatment measures that influence patient outcomes, and in doing so improve patient safety and maximize the efficacy of current treatments for neurosurgical and spinal patients.