Please join us Thursday, 04/29/2021 for POP Research seminar of the Spring 2021, held from 11:45 am-12:45 pm in Communicore, via Zoom. We will be welcoming Julie M. Donohue, Ph.D. as our 2nd Abraham Hartzema-Endowed Lecture Series guest speaker.
Julie M. Donohue, Ph.D. is a Professor and Chair of the Department of Health Policy and Management, at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health. She directs the Medicaid Research Center which provides analytic support to the Pennsylvania Department of Human Services. She also serves as an Associate Editor for JAMA Health Forum, a health policy and health services journal launched in January 2021. Donohue conducts research on insurance coverage, financing, and delivery of health care with a focus on use of pharmaceuticals and behavioral health services. She has studied the impact of policy changes on access, quality and costs in Medicare, Medicaid and commercial insurance including coverage expansions under the Affordable Care Act. In collaboration with AcademyHealth, in 2017, she launched the Medicaid Outcomes Distributed Research Network (MODRN) to support multi-state Medicaid policy evaluations. Donohue also conducts research on regional variation in health care use and spending, and the organizational, industry and policy influences on physician prescribing behavior. Her research has been funded by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute, and by several foundations, and has been published in leading clinical and policy journals.
Dr. Donohue’s seminar title is: “Building a Medicaid policy laboratory to address the opioid crisis.” Abstract: Medicaid covers more than 77 million in the US and plays a critical role in providing health care to vulnerable populations. Medicaid is not one program but 50 as each state exerts substantial influence over the program’s structure, who it serves and the benefits delivered. There is much to be learned from state Medicaid policy variation but little analytic infrastructure to support evaluation efforts. This presentation shares lessons from academic-state partnerships with Medicaid agencies to address urgent public health needs. It also describes the design, implementation, and findings from a distributed research network of academic-state partnerships with Medicaid in 13 states.
To join the meeting: Please contact Katherine Morris, Motomori Lewis, or Valarie Jackson for the Zoom link and password.