Meet Research Lead Orman Hall

January 11, 2022

Orman Hall comes to the Alliance with a long history in behavioral health care management and a commitment to making data-driven decisions. 

After a career spanning almost four decades where he and other administrators had been required to make funding and program decisions based on impressions and anecdotal information, he decided to seek opportunities to quantify and assess the nature and extent of issues confronting policymakers and local planners. He is grateful to the Alliance for providing him with opportunities to conduct original research and produce monographs on some of Ohio’s most pressing social problems. 

One example is mining Ohio mortality data, an ongoing project he works on collaboratively with Alliance Director Rick Hodges, Ani Ruhil, a Voinovich School professor, and other Alliance associates like aging expert Melissa Kimmel, Trent Hall, an OSU-based physician and researcher, and Joe Gay a widely respected Ohio expert on addiction disorders. Hodges was able to negotiate with the Ohio Department of Health for identified mortality data spanning more than a decade. The dataset includes detailed demographics such as age, gender, marital status, education attainment, death diagnoses, location of death, location of injury and residential location for all Ohio decedents from 2010 through 2019. 

Initial work aimed at developing a more complete understanding of how overdose deaths have affected Ohio communities. Using new quantitative measures, Alliance researchers found that overdose deaths accounted for more than 1 million years of life lost for the ten-year period and that among major diagnostic categories, overdose deaths had the greatest effect on reducing the lifespan of all Ohioans.  

The research team uses the R statistical package to produce detailed community-level reports showing how overdose and other causes of mortality impact Ohio communities and populations. We believe this work can become the foundation for a more systematic way to understand how diseases and social problems are causing premature mortality and diminishing the quality of life in Ohio.

"Our team is excited about the potential of expanding this research paradigm to counties and cities throughout the state," Hall said.