Research

Dr. Quarrier’s research has one throughline: making HoLEP better, easier to learn, and easier to live through — measured by what actually matters to patients.

Teaching HoLEP to more surgeons

HoLEP works. The problem is that not enough surgeons offer it — it has a real learning curve, and many urologists never trained on it. That’s the single biggest barrier between patients and this operation.

Much of Dr. Quarrier’s academic work centers here: he teaches HoLEP nationally — as a course director at national meetings and as a hands-on instructor for practicing urologists — and his research studies how to teach the procedure better and faster, including what predicts good outcomes early in a surgeon’s experience. The goal is straightforward: more well-trained HoLEP surgeons means more patients who can actually get the operation, closer to home.

What this means for you: the same approach that trains other surgeons is the approach used on your case — a technique refined enough to be teachable, and honest about the experience that good outcomes require.

Measuring what actually matters to patients

Benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH) is a quality-of-life disease. What matters isn’t a number on a flow machine — it’s whether you sleep through the night, whether urgency runs your day, whether sex and continence are where you want them. So Dr. Quarrier’s research focuses on patient-reported outcomes: capturing the symptoms patients actually feel, not just the measurements that are easy to chart.

This line of work includes “Defining the Drip,” a systematic review that pushed the field toward measuring post-HoLEP continence rigorously and consistently, and work distributing the standard symptom questionnaire (the International Prostate Symptom Score (IPSS)) through the patient portal so every visit starts with your own current report. In one study of 266 men followed through the year after HoLEP (Campbell et al., Journal of Endourology, 2024), patients who came in with incontinence — which is most often the urgent, can’t-hold-it type — had a significant improvement in that incontinence by one year. The takeaway for patients: pre-existing leakage, especially urge-related leakage, is not a reason to expect a poor result from HoLEP, and is often something the operation helps.

What this means for you: your results are tracked against what you report, and the conversation about whether the operation worked starts from your experience, not a chart value.

Equity in BPH care

Most BPH research treats patients as one uniform group. Dr. Quarrier’s group has published work showing that men from more disadvantaged neighborhoods arrive with worse symptoms, and that BPH surgery delivers its benefit across social-risk groups — that is, the operation works regardless of who you are or where you live. The point of the research is to make sure the right operation actually reaches the people who need it.

What this means for you: the practice is built to offer the appropriate operation across literacy levels, languages, and circumstances — not just to the patients who find it easiest to navigate the system.

Improving the patient experience

Some of the most practical research is about making the operation easier to go through: protocols that let most patients go home the same day, remove their catheter (a thin, flexible tube that drains urine from the bladder) at home rather than returning for a visit, and recover with clear, realistic expectations. The aim is to keep the things that make HoLEP durable and effective while removing the friction that used to come with it.

What this means for you: a shorter hospital stay, fewer trips back, and a recovery you’ve been told the truth about. See the recovery page for the week-by-week version.

Recognition

2025 Healthcare Research All-Star — Top 5% U.S. Urology (Avant-garde Health)
2024 AUA Young Urologist of the Year
2025 Inductee, R.O.C.K. Society (Research on Calculous Kinetics)
Appointed to the AUA New Technologies & Imaging Committee (2026) and the Endourological Society BPH Research Subcommittee (2025)

Full publication list

For the complete, current publication list:

ORCID: 0000-0002-2546-5264
Google Scholar: Dr. Scott Quarrier
UR Medicine profile: Dr. Scott Quarrier

Support BPH research

NIH funding for benign urologic disease has been falling. BPH affects more than half of men over sixty and is a leading cause of nighttime sleep disruption, falls, and reduced quality of life in older men — but the federal research investment per affected patient is a fraction of what comparably common diseases receive. Private and philanthropic support increasingly fills the gap.

Two organizations directly benefit from donor support:

UR Medicine Urology research — Donations support equity-in-BPH-care research, patient-reported outcomes work, and training the next generation of HoLEP surgeons. Visit UR Medicine Urology Giving.

Prostate Enucleation (the prostate's inner core is removed whole, leaving the outer shell intact) Collaborative (PEC) — enucleate.org — the surgical society dedicated to advancing prostate enucleation training. Donations directly translate into more patients having access to HoLEP-trained surgeons.

Neither donation supports Dr. Quarrier personally. Both support the missions the work on this page represents.