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Ralph Ward PhD

Ralph Claude Ward PhD

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wardrc@musc.edu

35 Cannon Street Room CS 302F

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Rank
  • Associate Professor
College
  • College of Medicine
Department
  • Public Health Sciences
Academic Focus
  • Health disparities in diabetes, stroke, CKD, lung cancer, and opioid use disorder
  • Predictive analytics in large electronic medical record data
  • Longitudinal analysis, including joint models and missing data methods
Faculty email addresses should not be used to seek medical advice or to make medical appointments. Please visit MyChart for medical appointments or to contact your provider.

Locations

Office Location
street
room

Biography

Dr. Ralph Ward is a Research Assistant Professor at MUSC and a Research Scientist with the VA Health Services Research and Development (HSR&D) funded Health Equity and  Rural Outreach Innovation  Center (HEROIC) in Charleston, SC.  He received his Ph.D. in biostatistics from MUSC in 2017.  His dissertation work involved developing methods to better assess health disparities among Veterans using traditional statistical approaches and newer machine learning tools. This work focused on applications for assessing disease burden as coded by the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) system and for dealing with missing covariates in administrative healthcare data.

Dr. Ward's research interests include health services outcomes and disparities research, including the development of improved approaches for analysis of very large datasets, for handling missing data, and for summarizing patient comorbidities using ICD data. In 2019, Dr. Ward received a 2-year Research Development Award from the Veterans Integrated Service Network (VISN) 7 for research to develop improved methods to identify and predict opioid abuse disorder and the risk  of related overdose and suicide events using administrative healthcare data.