Welcome to the Healthcare Allocation Laboratory
Principle Investigator Dr. William Parker is a Pulmonary and Critical Care Physician at UChicago Medicine and Assistant Professor of Medicine at the the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine. He is also Founding Executive Director of the Common Longitudinal ICU data Format (CLIF) Consortium, an open-source data standard for longitudinal ICU data that enables privacy-preserving multi-center research.
The Healthcare Allocation (HCA) Lab is a data science laboratory that conducts biostatistical research examining allocation of absolutely scarce healthcare resources. We strive to contribute to the improvement of equity in healthcare allocation by designing algorithmic allocation systems that are based in fundamental ethical principles and evaluating the effects of current allocation policies and procedures on patients’ health and well-being in the real world.
Funding
Research conducted by the HCA Lab is funded in part by the National Institutes of Health (K and R grants) and The Greenwall Foundation
GitHub Repositories
We upload project summaries, code, instructional blog posts, and other resources from our research projects on our GitHub repositories. You can access them using the links below.
Latest Publications
Association of the 2018 U.S. Heart Allocation Policy Change and the Survival Benefit of Heart Transplantation
“The 2018 heart allocation policy change has led to better stratification and prioritization of candidates by clinical acuity, resulting in higher survival benefit of transplantation performed. Combined with higher transplantation rates, the 2018 heart allocation policy has saved thousands of life-years and achieved one of its major goals” (Tolmie et al., 2025).
Age and Saving Lives in Crisis Standards of Care: A Multicenter Cohort Study of Triage Score Prognostic Accuracy
“Age-inclusive triage better identifies ICU survivors than SOFA alone and is more equitable. Incorporating age into prioritization algorithms could save more lives in a crisis scenario” (Hermsen et al., 2025).
A common longitudinal intensive care unit data format (CLIF) for critical illness research
“CLIF enables transparent, efficient, and reproducible critical care research across diverse health systems. Our federated case studies showcase CLIF’s potential for disease sub-phenotyping and clinical decision-support evaluation. Future applications include pragmatic EHR-based trials, target trial emulations, foundational artificial intelligence (AI) models of critical illness, and real-time critical care quality dashboards” (Rojas et al., 2025).
Lab Spotlight
Lab presented at 2025 World Transplant Congress
Members of our lab presented talks and posters on our organ allocation projects at the World Transplant Congress annual meeting in San Francisco, CA.
CLIF Consortium at American Thoracic Society 2025
Dr. Parker and colleagues represented the Common Longitudinal ICU data Format (CLIF) Consortium at the American Thoracic Society international conference in San Fransisco, CA.
Lab at ISHLT 2024
Some of our talented medical students – Kevin Lazenby, Gege Ran, Stratton Tolmie, and Sharon Zeng – presented their research at the International Society for Heart and Lung Transplantation (ISHLT) 44th Annual Meeting in Prague, Czech Republic.
Our Research
In our work, we combine the principles of Clinical Medical Ethics with our obersvations from real patient health data to create practical allocation protocols. We then examine patient outcomes and finetune these protocols to maximize the number of lives saved.
