Biography
Dr. Law is a Pulmonary and Critical Care physician, clinical epidemiologist, and health services researcher with a focus on understanding determinants of outcomes after critical illness. An unprecedented number of patients now survive the intensive care unit (ICU) but suffer severe organ dysfunction, requiring forms of long-term organ support, such as mechanical ventilation or artificial nutrition. Using both granular clinical and national claims databases, and leveraging natural experiments where feasible (e.g., policy changes), the goal of her research is to better inform decision-making during critical illness and the optimal delivery of care after acute critical illness.
She has published > 70 original studies in high-impact journals including JAMA, JAMA Internal Medicine, JAMA Network Open, AJRCCM, and Annals of Internal Medicine. Her work has been included in the Top Papers” in the ATS Clinical Year in Review (2023, 2024), and covered by media outlets such as NPR, U.S. News & World Report, and the Associated Press. Her NIA-funded F32 and NHLBI-funded K23 characterized national practices and outcomes for patients receiving long-term feeding and breathing tubes during critical illness. These studies demonstrated (1) poor patient-centered outcomes after receipt of feeding/breathing tubes and (2) unexpected declines in incidence of prolonged mechanical ventilation with increases in palliative care and hospice among Medicare beneficiaries—trends that diverged from earlier projections. She also showed that Medicare payment reforms substantially reduced access to long-term acute care hospitals (LTACHs), leading to increased use of do-not-resuscitate orders and lower costs to Medicare, highlighting how policy shifts influence upstream care decisions and post-acute resource use. She now helms an R01, "Quantifying Uncertainty to Inform Time-Limited Trials of Invasive Mechanical Ventilation" (scored in the 1st percentile at NIH/NHLBI), which seeks to improve patient and family engagement in early prognostication for mechanically ventilated patients.