Dr. Kiana Yazdani moved from Abadan, Iran to Canada in 2017 with the aspiration of pursuing her Master’s degree in Experimental Medicine at UBC. There she became familiar with administrative data, an introduction that completely drew her in upon realizing that the data told stories. Embedded in the data held thousands of individual stories that ultimately could help inform where and how to improve the state of healthcare. Upon completing her Master’s degree, she found herself landing a position at the BC-CfE for a very formative three years that inspired her to hit the books at UBC once again. This time she had her sights set on a long-time dream of hers, pursuing a PhD under the supervision of Dr. Viviane Lima that she was grateful to have defended this July.
As a clinical researcher for the BC-CfE, she noticed the immense barriers faced by individuals living with overlapping conditions to receive the proper care, particularly with the ongoing toxic drug supply crisis. Her PhD research focused on opioid agonist therapy (OAT) among people living with HIV who simultaneously experienced opioid use and mental health disorders — specifically understanding how people engage with OAT over time and whether the engagement with OAT would improve in association with enhanced treatment for concurrent disorders. Dr. Yazdani mentions that, “While OAT is highly effective, we often evaluate it simply as whether someone is “on treatment” or “off treatment”. She believed that creating methods to more accurately capture the quality and consistency of engagement, more could be done to improve how the healthcare system support individuals on treatment.
Through her research, Dr. Yazdani found that people receiving OAT had vastly higher rates of receiving pharmacological treatment for mental health disorders than those not receiving OAT. Consistent adherence to OAT had more than a six-fold increase in psychotropic medication dispensations, though engagement is not entirely equal among all groups. Individuals with psychotic disorders had more challenges maintaining treatment, indicating that the current care systems may not sufficiently fulfil the needs of individuals with more complex mental health conditions. “Overall, the research suggests that OAT can serve as a platform for broader healthcare engagement,” said Dr. Yazdani, “but only if we optimize its delivery and make it more responsive to the needs of people with concurrent disorders.”
With her PhD now complete, Dr. Yazdani hopes to spend some much-needed time with her family outside of research, and pursue become a role as an independent scientist and mentor. With her research, she hopes to continue building an independent research program on improving addiction care through epidemiology, health data science, and implementation research. She is particularly interested in better personalizing OAT to develop improved care models for those with concurrent mental disorders and using data to inform policy and clinical practice.
Ultimately what matters most to her is that her research, even on a small scale, is improving lives. In doing that, Dr. Kiana Yazdani listens. She takes in the stories derived from patients, clinicians, and data to find answers from a perspective that would otherwise go overlooked — and she enjoys doing it.
“Science is full of uncertainty, and rather than finding that frustrating, I think that’s what makes it exciting. It’s an opportunity to keep learning.”
Dr. Kiana Yazdani