Alec O'Connor, M.D.
Assistant Professor

Education and Training:

B. A. University of California at Berkeley, 1992

M.D. Medical School at Indiana School of Medicine, 1996

Residency, University of Rochester, 1996-1999

Chief Resident, University of Rochester, 1999-2000

Faculty Member since: 2000

Dr. Alec O'Connor is the principal investigator on a prospective, observational study to assess the outcomes of pain treatment with morphine versus other agents in the Emergency Department. Collaborating with Dr. TImothy Quill from Palliative Care and Dr. Valerie lang, Dr. O'Connor previously showed that the dosing of morphine is inadequate in clinical practice. The current study, supported by a grant from the Mayday Fund, aims to determine patient and prescriber variables that affect the choice of opiod and opiod dose. Once these issues are better understood, Dr. O'Connor intends to design and test interventions to improve opiod dosing and pain management outcomes.

Dr. O'Connor also leads a study of the inpatient medicine curriculum for resident students. He hypothesizes that the Observation Unit and the midlevel practitioner service together skew the residents' caseload towards the sicker, more complicated end of the spectrum. Unchecked, residents would fail to gain exposure to patients with some of the more common condition that internists would be expected to encounter in practice. this would have important implications for inpatient curriculum design. He is currently evaluating the effectiveness of a new admission algorith designed to distribute patients more randomly to residents and MLP's.