The focus of Dr. Birkmeyer’s research is collaborative quality improvement, comparative effectiveness research, and health services research. In her role as a principal research scientist at the Dartmouth Institute, Birkmeyer participates in studies to evaluate treatments and improve the quality of care for a variety of conditions.

Early in her career, her work was devoted to improving the quality of surgical treatment by filling holes in its underlying evidence base. Specifically, in designing and conducting clinical trials to provide answers to critical unanswered questions in surgery. Another strand of her work has focused on policy relevant-health services research. These studies, frequently based on analyses of large administrative databases, have identified structural characteristics of care that underlie variations and disparities in clinical outcomes and relationships between the costs and quality of care. Using meta-analysis, decision analysis, and mixed qualitative and quantitative methods to improve clinical and patient decision-making has also been a focus of her research.