Sachin Kheterpal, the Kevin K. Tremper Research Professor in the Department of Anesthesiology, was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in recognition of his vision for and international leadership in anesthesiology informatics and clinical research.
He is one of five University of Michigan professors elected this year to the academy — the highest honorary society in the United States for researchers in medicine and health — and joins a select group of current and emeritus U-M faculty and living former faculty to be inducted.
Kheterpal’s career has focused on the use of novel information technology and electronic health records (EHR) for patient care, quality improvement, and research. Prior to his academic medicine career, he was the lead architect for a commercially available acute care electronic health record used by hospitals across the U.S. Using innovative techniques to integrate administrative, EHR, and registry data across institutions, he established the Multicenter Perioperative Outcomes Group (MPOG) in 2008 and serves as its principal investigator. Today, MPOG has accumulated more than 16 million patient records with risk-adjusted long-term outcome data and detailed clinical intervention data spanning more than 50 hospitals across dozens of states and multiple countries for outcomes research and quality improvement.
Most recently, he is the principal investigator of a $30 million PCORI-funded pragmatic large comparative effectiveness trial, THRIVE (Trajectories of Recovery after Intravenous Propofol vs inhaled VolatilE anesthesia), which will enroll 12,500 patients in a prospective, randomized controlled trial across 20 MPOG clinical sites. His leadership of MPOG has transformed the field through international epidemiologic studies, national personalized quality improvement implementation, pragmatic clinical trials, and data science.
In addition, his team’s recent work has focused on clarifying the role of mobile health and wearable technology in enabling more patient-centered research. He led a team that enrolled more than 7,000 participants in a longitudinal study of health trajectories integrating smartphone, wearable, home blood pressure cuff, EHR, survey, laboratory testing, and genotyping data.
His research and quality improvement efforts have been funded through various industry sponsors, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan, the National Institutes of Health, and the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute.
In 2017, Kheterpal was appointed as the associate dean for research information technology at the U-M Medical School, guiding the vision and strategy to effectively use information technology to advance the school’s research mission. He is also the associate chair of strategy and technology and executive director of outcomes research within the Department of Anesthesiology.
Nationally, Kheterpal has served as a member of the NIH Precision Medicine Initiative Advisory Panel, the NIH Council of Councils, and is co-chairing NIH’s Novel and Exceptional Technology and Research Advisory Committee (NExTRAC) working group on Data Science. In 2013, he was named the recipient of the American Society of Anesthesiologists (ASA) Presidential Scholar Award, which annually recognizes an ASA member who has dedicated their formative career to research.
Kheterpal received his Bachelor of Science, Doctorate of Medicine, and Master in Business Administration degrees from the University of Michigan. He also completed an anesthesiology residency and transplant anesthesia fellowship at U-M.
