Current Research Interests

Ray has expertise in the measurement and analysis of Patient-Reported Outcome (PRO) data, psychometrics, and clinical trial design and analysis.  He currently collaborates extensively with researchers in the MSKCC Integrative Medicine service on clinical trials evaluating the effectiveness of various integrative medicine therapies (e.g., acupuncture, massage, music therapy) at improving patient-reported outcomes such as pain, anxiety, and sleep disturbance.  He also collaborates with Dr. Katherine Panageas and Health Informatics in service of the new MATCHES (Making Telehealth Delivery of Cancer Care at Home Effective and Safe) Telehealth Research Center, one of four such centers funded by the National Cancer Institute’s Telehealth Research Centers of Excellence (TRACE) initiative.  Previously, Ray served as co-chair of the MSKCC Biostatistics Protocol Review Committee for over 10 years.  In that role, he developed guidelines to improve and standardize how the PRO components of research are detailed in MSKCC research protocols.

Ray is the author and maintainer of three R packages intended to help facilitate accurate and consistent scoring of PRO measures: (1) FACTscorer (https://github.com/raybaser/FACTscorer) scores most of the questionnaires in the “FACT” (Functional Assessment of Cancer Therapy) and “FACIT” (Functional Assessment of Chronic Illness Therapy) quality of life measurement systems; (2) PROscorer (https://cran.r-project.org/package=PROscorer) is a more general repository of scoring algorithms for commonly used PRO measures; (3) PROscorerTools (https://cran.r-project.org/package=PROscorerTools) contains helper functions that form the backbone of the functions in PROscorer.