Dr. Lisa Hicks is a malignant hematologist at St. Michael’s Hospital with an academic focus in health services research and quality improvement. She uses traditional clinical epidemiology methods combined with quality improvement techniques to develop interventions to improve the safety and efficiency of patient care. Thematically, her work focuses on understanding drivers of over-utilization in healthcare and on developing strategies to decrease this phenomenon. She also has an interest in optimizing the safety of cancer treatments. In particular, Dr. Hicks leads research that aims to understand the risk of COVID-19 in patients with blood cancer and how to optimize vaccination in this population. Dr. Hicks is also an active contributor to the development of clinical practice guidelines. She collaborates in this work with Cancer Care Ontario (CCO) and the American Society of Hematology (ASH). Finally, Dr. Hicks has a large clinical practice in Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) associated lymphoma and has led clinical studies in this area.
Dr. Hicks is the Chair of the Committee on Quality, for the American Society of Hematology (ASH) and is past-chair of the ASH Choosing Wisely Task Force. Dr. Hicks is the St. Michael’s Hospital Lead for a Hospital initiative addressing overutilization