Gurvaneet Randhawa

Gurvaneet Randhawa, M.D., M.P.H., is a Medical Officer in the Health Systems and Interventions Research Branch (HSIRB). His research interests include the use of information technology (IT) to support communication and collaboration in care delivery and to reduce the burden of healthcare delivery tasks on clinicians, patients and their caregivers. He is also interested in the use of IT to conduct large-scale cancer care delivery research, especially on treatment variations in cancer patients. He also serves as the DCCPS liaison to the NCI Small Business Innovation Research Development Center.

Before joining NCI, he worked at the AHRQ for 13 years where he was a Medical Officer and a Senior Advisor on Clinical Genomics and Personalized Medicine. Prior to joining AHRQ, he completed his Preventive Medicine residency at Johns Hopkins University in 2002, which included a stint at NIAID. He completed an Internal Medicine internship at University of Pennsylvania in 2000. Prior to that, he trained for nine years in biomedical research at Johns Hopkins and at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center. His research interests at that time were in molecular biology and genomics with a focus on chronic myelogenous leukemia. He obtained his medical degree from Medical College, Amritsar, India.

Dr. Randhawa served in several roles at AHRQ. He started work in the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) program and soon became the USPSTF program director. He led a reengineering effort to increase program efficiency and productivity, which cleared a multi-year backlog of USPSTF recommendations. More recently, he was the lead author of four ARRA-funded RFAs that created four new programs: Prospective Outcome Systems using Patient-specific Electronic data to Compare Tests and therapies (PROSPECT); scalable distributed research networks; enhanced registries for quality improvement (QI) and comparative effectiveness research (CER); and the Electronic Data Methods (EDM) Forum. These collectively built a national clinical electronic data infrastructure that used prospective, patient-centered outcomes data and connected different clinical databases for CER, which provided a foundation for the PCORI-supported National Patient-Centered Clinical Research Network (PCORnet). The enhanced registries program provided successful models of learning health systems. A major EDM Forum achievement is the launch of a new open-access electronic journal – eGEMs – that has published over 100 papers with over 75,000 downloads in less than 3 years of existence and is available in PubMed Central. The EDM Forum has created a multi-disciplinary learning community. It supports collaborative methods projects at the intersection of clinical informatics, research, QI and clinical care.

Dr. Randhawa worked with the Developing Evidence to Inform Decisions about Effectiveness (DEcIDE), Centers for Education and Research on Therapeutics (CERTs), and the Evidence-based Practice Centers (EPC) programs. He provided scientific direction to a DEcIDE project to create a new distributed research network in ambulatory care (DARTNet), which evolved into an independent, self-sustaining organization called the DARTNet Institute. DARTNet sustainably implemented screening for depression in primary care. He provided direction to another DEcIDE project to develop a clinical decision support tool for primary care to evaluate patients for BRCA testing, which helps to implement USPSTF recommendations. The tool has been adapted for use by the CDC. He provided program guidance to several EPC projects that evaluated genomic tests for the CDC-sponsored Evaluation of Genomic Applications in Practice and Prevention (EGAPP) working group.

Dr. Randhawa’s last role at AHRQ was in the division of health IT, where he helped in the strategic planning for future investments and served as a project officer for health IT grants. He has authored numerous publications, serves as a peer-reviewer for scientific journals, and served in several national committees, including the Secretary’s Advisory Committee on Genetics, Health, and Society (SACGHS), steering committee of EGAPP, planning board of a FDA-supported national medical device surveillance system, and steering committee of the PCORnet.