Dr. Amanda Filiberto Receives VA Palo Alto Early Career Development Award to Advance Surgical Decision-Making Research

Stanford Vascular Surgery faculty member Dr. Amanda Filiberto has received a Veterans Affairs (VA) Palo Alto Early Career Development Award to support research focused on improving postoperative care for Veterans undergoing inpatient surgery.

Her two-year project, "Optimizing Postoperative Triage After Inpatient Surgery Within the Veterans Affairs Healthcare System," aims to better understand how postoperative triage decisions are made across the VA health care system and develop a machine learning algorithm that predicts patient outcomes using preoperative and intraoperative data available at the end of surgery. The long-term goal is to translate this work into a clinical decision support tool that helps surgeons determine the most appropriate postoperative level of care for individual patients.

As the largest integrated health care system in the United States, the VA offers a unique environment for large-scale electronic health record research with the potential to improve surgical care for Veterans nationwide.

"Veterans represent a uniquely high-risk surgical population, and there is a critical need to optimize postoperative triage destination, especially for low-acuity patients admitted to an ICU and high-acuity patients admitted to a hospital floor after inpatient surgery," said Filiberto.

The award provides protected research time, allowing Filiberto to focus on developing and validating the predictive models that will form the foundation of the project.

"This award represents the first rung on the funding ladder as a first-year attending," Filiberto said. "I'm excited to build on this work and generate the preliminary data needed to pursue a VA Career Development Award in the coming years."

Dr. Filiberto's primary mentor is Dr. Shipra Arya, with co-mentors and collaborators Drs. Todd Wagner, Suzanne Tamang, Tyler Loftus, and Mary Hawn.

The research has the potential to improve postoperative decision-making and patient outcomes for Veterans across the nation's largest integrated health care system.