People

University of Pennsylvania

Melissa Berkowitz, MPP is a Project Manager in the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy. She received her Master of Public Policy with a Policy Analysis Specialization from the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin, Germany and her BA in History from New York University. She has studied and worked in New York City, Accra, Tel Aviv, Berlin, and Philadelphia in the fields of international entrepreneurial development, low-income home care, veterans’ care, workers’ rights protection, and international education. Her research interests focus on the socioeconomic impacts of life and health shocks. She is currently working on projects related to the informal care market for older adults, the effects of cognitive training on older adults, and the variation in end of life care.

Norma B. Coe, PhD is an Associate Professor of Medical Ethics & Health Policy at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. She received her PhD in Economics from MIT and BA in Economics from the College of William & Mary. Dr. Coe is a health economist whose research focuses on identifying causal effects of policies that directly and indirectly impact health, human behavior, health care access, and health care utilization. She has studied healthcare costs, costs to caregivers, the quality of care delivered in an informal vs. formal care setting, the cost-effectiveness of various interventions, and worked with forecasting models. In her research projects, Dr. Coe uses econometric and health services research techniques to answer pressing questions for policymakers about aging in America.

Melissa Oney, PhD is a Statistical Analyst at the University of Pennsylvania. She has a PhD in Economics from Temple University, where she specialized in health economics and applied econometrics. Her research interests broadly relate to health equity and public policy. Her recent research has focused on factors affecting a couple’s decision to purchase long-term care insurance. Additionally, her current research focuses on estimating out-of-pocket costs associated with dementia.

Jordan Weiss, MA graduated from the University of Southern California with a BSc in Economics and Mathematics in 2012. Before coming to Penn, he worked as a statistician in the Center for Health and Community at the University of California, San Francisco. Jordan’s current work examines the contribution of Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Dementias (ADRD) to population-level trends in mortality and life expectancy in the US. In related work, he combines a life course framework with multi-state modeling techniques to examine disparities in cognitive health transitions. Jordan is also developing a dynamic forecasting model for the future incidence, prevalence, and costs associated with ADRD in the United States in collaboration with Norma Coe and Anirban Basu. Additional research interests include informal care, long-term care policy, and bioethics.

University of Washington

Anirban Basu, PhD, MS, is a health economist and a statistician who specializes in research on comparative and cost effectiveness analyses, causal inference methods, program evaluation, and outcomes research. He directs The Comparative Health Outcomes, Policy, and Economics (CHOICE) Institute at the University of Washington, Seattle, with appointments in the departments of Pharmacy, Health Services, and Economics at the University. He is a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a Fellow of the American Statistical Association. He studies heterogeneity in clinical and economic outcomes, micro behavior with respect to heterogeneous information, and the value of individualized care. He teaches topics in health economics, decision analysis, cost-effectiveness analysis, and health services research methods. He received his PhD in Public Policy (Health Economics Specialization) from The University of Chicago and an MS in Biostatistics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Paul Crane, MD, MPH, is a general internist on the faculty at the University of Washington. One main area of research for Dr. Crane is studying the use of psychometric tests in medical settings. Dr. Crane has been involved with the Adult Changes in Thought (ACT) Study since 2002, one of the major datasets being used for the Cost of Alzheimer’s grant. He served as a PI on an R01 which studied the application of psychometric methods to data from the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative. Dr. Crane has also studied the difference between memory and executive functioning among people with early Alzheimer’s disease.

Paul Fishman, PhD is a health economist and health services researcher. Dr. Fishman is a Professor at the University of Washington’s School of Public Health. Prior to joining UW, Dr. Fishman spent 23 years at Group Health Cooperative conducting research on the cost and organization of care within Group Health’s integrated delivery system. He has studied the impact of a variety of health care needs on the cost and quality of care for children, including development of the first pediatric specific risk adjustment model to identify and predict the cost of care among children. He has also led evaluations of the patient centered medical home and how different clinical pathways impact outcomes on a population health basis. Dr. Fishman also teaches courses in health economics, health policy and risk and insurance to students in the University of Washington’s Public Health and Health Administration programs. Dr. Fishman has a PhD in Economics from the University of Washington.

Bailey C. Ingraham, MS is a doctoral student in Health Services at University of Washington with an emphasis in health economics and evaluative statistics. Research interests include health economics and evaluative methods, bridging econometric and biostatistical methods and studying economics of health information systems. Her experience prior to starting at UW include, two years as a biostatistician at the Value Institute consulting with providers on research evaluating patient outcomes in hospital data, completing a MS in Biostatistics (2014) from the Drexel University School of Public Health, and undergraduate degrees in Chemistry and Economics at Humboldt State University (2012). In addition to her education and research experience, she has over a decade of tutoring, teaching and management experience.

Lindsay White, PhD is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Health Services at the University of Washington. She completed both her PhD in Health Services Research and her MPH at the University of Washington. She also has a BS in Psychology from Duke University. Dr. White is a health services researcher whose research focuses on the intersection of quality and costs of health care, health policy, and medically complex patients. She is particularly interested in understanding how features of the health care delivery system and health policies, ranging from clinical to federal policies, affect the quality and efficiency of care received by people with dementia, with multimorbidity, and with other serious illnesses.

Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute

Eric B. Larson, MD, MPH, is Executive Director of Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute (KPWHRI) and Vice President for Research and Health Care Innovation at Kaiser Foundation Health Plan in Washington. A general internist by training, Dr. Larson is a national leader in geriatrics, health services, and clinical research and has been an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine since 2007. He is the founding Principal Investigator of the Kaiser Permanente Washington/University of Washington Alzheimer’s Disease Patient Registry (ADPR) /Adult Changes in Thought (ACT) study. The ongoing ACT cohort study, originally established in Group Health, now Kaiser-Permanente Washington, in 1994 is a rich and unique source for clinical and health economic data on dementia.

Drexel University

Sungchul Park, PhD is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Health Management and Policy at the Drexel University Dornsife School of Public Health. He completed his PhD in Health Services from the University of Washington. Dr. Park is a health economist and a health policy researcher with particular expertise in payment and delivery care systems. His research seeks to understand plan choice, health care utilization, health outcomes for Medicare beneficiaries with Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Dementias (ADRD) in Traditional Medicare (TM) and Medicare Advantage (MA). Several of his current research projects investigate patterns of switching between TM and MA among Medicare beneficiaries newly diagnosed with ADRD as well as comparison of health care utilization and care satisfaction between TM and MA beneficiaries with ADRD.