Welcome to the John Ratliff Lab

At present, I am working on a prospective measure to assess the risk of complications in spine surgery procedures. I am studying the impact of patient disease process, choice of operative approach, and patient pre-operative comorbidities on complication occurrence. The goal of this effort will be to develop a clinical tool that may be used in patient counseling.

Presently, a prospectively developed measure of comorbidities is being modeled to ICD-9 nomencature for use in the Nationwide Inpatient Sample database.

My longer term research goals are to develop clearer means of assessing outcomes in spine surgery procedures and developing patient-centered outcomes assessments that may be scalable for larger populations.