EXPERTISE
Real-world data science, Cancer epidemiology, Pharmacoepidemiology, Areca nut/betel quid epidemiology, Cancer control, Biostatistics (teaching & consulting)
RESEARCH INTERESTS
- Maximize impact of real-world data in enhancing cancer control strategies,
- Improve methodology to provide sufficient evidence for effectiveness and safety of cancer treatments,
- Collaborate with multidisciplinary experts to integrate feasible clinical informatics for cancer patient care systems.
RESEARCH ACTIVITIES & ACCOMPLISHMENT
Professor Yi-Hsin Yang, also known as Connie Yang, is a biostatistician by training. She has been actively involved in real-world data (RWD) and real-world evidence (RWE) development focusing on comparative effectiveness research. She has designed and implemented a common data model (CDM) for hospital-based health care big data to serve the needs of precision health research for the National Biobank Consortium of Taiwan (NBCT). While it is crucial to generated RWD by domain-knowledge experts to fulfill unmet needs in innovation biomedical science development, cross-government ministries and agencies have collaborated to the project of “Sustainable Platform for Big Data in Health Project”. Professor Yang is currently in charge the sub-theme entitled “Gateway to Health Data & Data Governance” being part of “Health Big Data Infrastructure Establishment” program. The goal is to provide a portal to ensure data users can find fit-for-use data from data providers.
Professor Yang has worked in the field of oral oncology and oral public health since 1996 as a faculty in the College of Dental Medicine, Kaohsiung Medical University. She had conducted several population-based studies in Taiwan on betel quid usage and prevalence of oral cancer/oral potentially malignant disorders (OPMD) (Yang et al., 2001, Yang et al., 2002, Kuo et al., 2009). Yang et al. (2001) is the first publication to report the prevalence of OPMD in Taiwan indigenous communities. In this report, the description of Taiwan areca/betel quid was cited by WHO IARC report #85(Anonymous, 2004). During the period of 2000-2001, Professor Yang was invited by NHRI Forum to write two reviews on areca nut/betel quid related issues on oral cancer and OPMD (Yang, 2000 [Chinese], Yang, 2001 [Chinese]). The two publications have become important readings for researchers. She also published papers on areca nut/betel quid associated (Yang et al., 2002, Yang et al., 2009b, Yap et al., 2008) incidence, survival rates and risk factors of oral cancer/OPMD (Chiang & Yang, 2017, Chung et al., 2004, Chung et al., 2005, Yang et al., 2005a, Yang et al., 2010, Yang et al., 2005b, Yang et al., 2009a, Yang & Warnakulasuriya, 2016). Yang et al. (2010) reported a dose-response association between betel quid chewing and OPMD, which allowed the Health Promotion Administration, Ministry of Health and Welfare to determine a possible target group for screening.
Because of her active participation in international societies, she has the privilege of collaborating with prestigious scholars. She collaborated with Professor Saman Warnakulasuriya from King’s College of London and published 6 papers (Ariyawardana et al., 2007, Awan et al., 2012, Chung et al., 2005, Eyeson et al., 2010, Yang et al., 2009b, Yang & Warnakulasuriya, 2016). She has helped several study designs and statistical analysis for the oral cancer research team in University of Malaya including Professors Rosnah Zain and Sok Ching Cheong and published 11 papers (Athirajan et al., 2014, Doss et al., 2017, Ghani et al., 2011, Ghani et al., 2012, Ghani et al., 2019a, Ghani et al., 2019b, Hamid et al., 2009, Vincent-Chong et al., 2013, Zanaruddin et al., 2013, Cheong et al., 2017, Saleh et al., 2012). She is a co-PI of the University Malaya High Impact Research (HIR) MOHE Grant: Early detection of potentially malignant and malignant oral mucosal lesions – Preventive, clinical and molecular approach, and the Cancer Research Malaysia: Early detection of oral cancer using MeMoSA App: A clinical trial for sensitivity and specificity evaluation.
She was invited by the National Cancer Institute (NCI), NIH, US in 2016 to deliver a talk on Methods in assessing screening: a review of RCT-oral cancer/potentially malignant disorder in the International Conference on Betel Quid and Areca Nut. NCI also invited her to speak on Epidemiology of areca nut use – the rising burden in the South East Asia and Taiwan in the section of Prioritizing research and policy interventions to prevent oral cancers – targeting the betel quid & areca nut users during the World Cancer Congress in 2018.
She joined the faculty of College of Pharmacy in August 2011. Since then, she has been actively involved in the field of pharmacoepidemiogy. Her research has focused on health related database analysis. She published several articles in chemoprevention agents for cancers as well as comparative effectiveness on cancer treatment modalities (Yang et al., 2012, Shen et al., 2013, Hsieh et al., 2014, Hsieh et al., 2015b, Hsieh et al., 2015a, Huang et al., 2016, Tsai et al., 2016, Huang et al., 2017).
Since 2019, She joined National Health Research Institutes, and has been devoted to RWD and RWE development through the use of health administrative database and government database (particularly, the National Health Insurance Research Database, Cancer Registry Database, Cancer Screening Database, National Health Interview Survey, etc.). Her focus includes analysis methodology and clinical research using health database. While maximize data impact has become an important theme of current precision health, she has collaborated with multi-disciplinary experts to establish infrastructures in promoting fit-for-use data elements, facilitating data interoperability and data quality.
