The Parker Healthcare Allocation (HCA) Lab is an NIH-funded data science research group at the University of Chicago, Department of Medicine and Public Health Sciences. We conduct biostatistical research examining the allocation of absolutely scarce healthcare resources, integrating advanced data science with normative ethical analysis to improve equity in healthcare allocation.

Our approach cycles through establishing ethical frameworks informed by empirical data → developing practical allocation algorithms → analyzing resulting outcomes → identifying and correcting unintended consequences.

Principal Investigator: William F. Parker, MD, PhD — Associate Professor of Pulmonary and Critical Care & Public Health Science; Assistant Director, MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics; Founding Executive Director, CLIF Consortium.

We work across three interconnected domains:

1. Deceased Donor Organ Allocation — Evaluating allocation systems for hearts, kidneys, and other organs, with a focus on maximizing survival benefit and reducing geographic and institutional variation.
2. Scarce Therapeutics Allocation — Evidence-based modeling of vaccine and therapeutic distribution policies, identifying and correcting racial and socioeconomic disparities.
3. Crisis Standards of Care — Ethical guidance for life-support allocation during emergencies, including analysis of scoring systems that may produce systemic disadvantages.

Launched in 2023, the Common Longitudinal ICU data Format (CLIF) Consortium is a foundational lab project that standardizes critical care EHR data across 17 institutions and 46 hospitals, enabling privacy-preserving multi-center research.

• Center Variation in Survival Benefit (2019)
• New Heart Allocation Policy
• Center Variation in High Priority Status
• Post Transplant Survival After 2018 Policy Change
• Association of Exceptions with Waitlist Mortality
• Accuracy of Initial Heart Transplant Rankings
• Post Transplant Survival for NRP vs. DPP
• Medical Urgency Score for Heart Transplant Candidates
• Association of Place-based Disadvantage Indices with Heart Waitlist Outcomes
• The US Transplant Risk Score (US-TRS)

• Survival Benefit of Kidney Transplant
• Association of Race/Ethnicity with Kidney Waitlist Priority
• En-Bloc Post-Transplant Survival

Supported by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), National Library of Medicine (NLM), and The Greenwall Foundation.

We welcome applications from MD or PhD researchers trained in healthcare data science, health policy, health services research, critical care, transplantation, or medical ethics. Medical and undergraduate student research rotations are also available (minimum 3-month commitment).

See our join page for open positions and application instructions, or contact us at healthallocate@bsd.uchicago.edu.

University of Chicago, Department of Medicine — 5841 S Maryland Ave, Chicago, IL 60637