Dr. Lisa Barbera

• Health services research
• Quality of care
• Symptom management
• Patient experience
• Patient reported outcomes in clinical care

Dr. Barbera's main area of interest is health services research in cancer. Her primary expertise is in using large administrative health datasets to study health care service use at the end of life at a population level can reflect the quality of end-of-life care. Services such as hospitalization, location of death, emergency department visits or palliative care service use are measurable with administrative data. Dr. Barbera has studied these services extensively in Ontario and is funded by the Canadian Centre for Applied Research in Cancer Control for a four-province comparison study.

Dr. Barbera has spent the last several years evaluating the impact of patient-reported symptoms by the Edmonton Symptom Assessment Scale on health service use at a population level. She has been recently funded by the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research to evaluate the management of pain in cancer patients in the province on Ontario. She has been funded by the Canadian Cancer Society Research Institute to evaluate the impact implementing a province wide system of symptom screening. Dr. Barbera was formerly the provincial lead for patient reported outcomes and symptom management at Cancer Care Ontario.

Dr. Barbera’s clinical expertise is radiation therapy for breast and gynecologic cancers. She is also interested in sexual health after treatment for cancer. She chaired the Program in Evidence-Based Care Working Group, which created a guideline addressing sexual function in cancer survivors.