University of Southern California

Minority Aging Health Economics Research Center

The National Institutes of Health recently awarded USC’s Schaeffer Center with $2.7 million over 5 years to establish a Resource Center for Minority Aging Research (RCMAR). The USC RCMAR is named the “Minority Aging Health Economics Research Center ” and with this prestigious, highly competitive award, we join a distinguished group of universities with an established RCMAR.

The Minority Aging Health Economics Research Center is led by Dana Goldman and Julie Zissimopoulos from the Schaeffer Center.  The mission is to provide infrastructure and resources to increase the number, diversity, and academic success of researchers focusing on the health and economic well-being of minority elderly populations.

The Center is housed at USC’s Schaeffer Center for Health Policy and Economics and brings together the resources of USC’s Roybal Center for Health Policy Simulation, Roybal Institute on Aging,  Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center, and RAND’s Roybal Center for Financial Decision Making.

The RCMAR will examine the differences across racial and ethnic groups of elderly in:

1. health care decision making, including medical care utilization and Medicare Part D plan choice;
2. health behaviors and outcomes; and
3. financial behavior including savings and work, and economic well-being.

The aims are to support research careers in the health and economic challenges of minority elderly; to solicit pilot studies; to mentor junior faculty (RCMAR scholars) in multidisciplinary training; to begin new lines of research; and to track and evaluate success of pilot investigators, RCMAR scholars.

Current RCMAR Scholars:

Cleopatra Abdou, Ph.D., Dr. Abdou conducts experimental and survey research to investigate how society, culture, stress and positive resources interact to affect health, well-being and aging more broadly over the individual lifespan and across multiple generations. Dr. Abdou’s research focuses on African Americans, Arabs, and Latinos in the U.S. and Egyptians in the Middle East. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Michigan Center for Integrative Approaches to Health Disparities, and Advancing Scholarship in the Humanities and Social Sciences, and has been published in flagship scientific journals in psychology, medicine, and public health.

Dr. Abdou has also been awarded the U.S.-Egypt Joint Fund for Science & Technology’s Junior Scientist Development Award by the National Institute of Standards and Technology to help establish her research program on cultural resources, social stress, and health inequity in Egypt, with the Social Research Center at the American University in Cairo serving as her academic base in Egypt.

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Silvia Helena Barcellos, Silvia Helena Barcellos is an Associate Economist at RAND Corporation, Santa Monica Office. Her research focuses on applied microeconomics topics in labor and development economics. Her labor economics research includes works on the economic causes and consequences of immigration to the United States and on the effects of taxation on location and organizational choices of firms and individuals. In research on development economics, Barcellos has investigated the existence of gender discrimination in parental time investments in India.

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Ricardo Basurto-Dávila, Ph.D., is a health economist at the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health. He leads economic evaluations and policy analysis, furthering the Department’s goal to increase its capacity for decisionmaking through the use of quantitative analysis. He was previously a Prevention Effectiveness Fellow at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where he conducted economic evaluations of the efforts implemented by the United States and other countries to respond to the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic. Prior to that, he worked at RAND Corporation research projects, where his work focused on migration, social and environmental determinants of health, and inequalities in health and health care. He has published in social science, public health, and medical journals. Dr. Basurto-Dávila earned a B.A. in Economics from Tecnológico de Monterrey in Mexico, an M.Sc. in Economics from the University of Texas at Austin, and the Ph.D. in Policy Analysis from the F.S. Pardee RAND Graduate School.

To apply to become a RCMAR Scholar please fill out the link below:

USC RCMAR_RFA_LoI

For all meetings, events, and deadlines, see below:

Calendar Here

For more information, please contact:

Patient Centered Diabetes Registry (PCDR)

Principal Investigator: Dana P. Goldman, Ph.D.

With the generous support of InHealth (Institute for Health Technology Studies), A team of researchers from the Schaeffer Center and RAND has launched the Patient-Centered Diabetes Registry (PCDR), a longitudinal data collection effort that combines provider and patient surveys with clinical health data.

A number of prominent diabetes centers and community clinics from around the country have been selected for the study. The PCDR will provide new information on different diabetes therapies related to glucose monitoring and insulin delivery and patients’ adherence to treatment. The study will also include analysis of the long-term consequences for different socio-economic groups. Study measures will be both clinical and patient-centered so that, ultimately, the findings will help improve patient health as well as quality of life, workplace productivity and functional status.

National Institute of Aging, Medical MalPractice, Healthcare Costs, and Technology Adoption

The Welfare Effects of Medical Malpractice Liability

Principal Investigator: Darius Lakdawalla

We use variation in the generosity of local juries to identify the causal impact of malpractice liability on social welfare.  Growth in malpractice payments over the last decade and a half contributed at most 5 percentage points to the 33% total real growth in medical expenditures.  On the other hand, malpractice leads to modest mortality reductions; the value of these more than likely exceeds the costs of malpractice liability.  Therefore, reducing malpractice cost is unlikely to have a major impact on health care spending, and unlikely to be cost-effective over conventionally accepted values of a statistical life.

National Institute of Aging, Improving Pharmacy Benefit Design

Principal Investigator: Dana Goldman

National Institute of Aging, Roybal Center for Health Policy Simulation

Principal Investigator: Dana Goldman

The Roybal Center is a collaborative effort between USC and the RAND Corporation. The mission of the Roybal Center for Health Policy Simulation is to develop better models to understand the consequences of biomedical developments and social forces for health, health spending and health care delivery. In 2010, the Roybal Center moved to USC’s Leonard D. Schaeffer Center for Health Policy and Economics. Funded by the National Institute on Aging since 2004, the Roybal Center supports the Future Elderly Model (FEM), a multi-year effort to identify and forecast the consequences of medical breakthroughs over the next 30 years, and the role that regulation plays in promoting or hindering global innovation. The FEM has already begun to shape the national discussion about the role that medical technology will play in explaining health and health care spending. The FEM has also provided the first quantifiable model of the long-run population health consequences of pharmaceutical regulation.

The Future Elderly Model

The Future Elderly Model is a demographic and economic simulation model designed to predict the future costs and health status of the elderly and explore what current trends or future shifts imply for policy. Developed by Dana Goldman and his colleagues at the USC and RAND Roybal Center, the model uses a representative sample of approximately 100,000 Medicare beneficiaries age 65 and over drawn from the Medicare Current Beneficiary Surveys, national surveys that ask Medicare beneficiaries about chronic conditions, use of health care services, medical care spending, and health insurance coverage. Each beneficiary in the sample is linked to Medicare claims records to track actual medical care use and costs over time.

Learn more at: http://roybal.healthpolicy.usc.edu.

National Institute of Aging, Obesity in Older Americans

Principal Investigator: Dana Goldman

MacArthur Foundation, Costs and Benefits of Interventions

Principal Investigator: Dana Goldman

The Science of Medicare Reform

Principal Investigator:  Dana P. Goldman, Ph.D.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) awarded more than $5 million to Dr. Goldman to lead a multidisciplinary team spanning four research institutions to study specific applications of comparative effectiveness research (CER) to the Medicare program. This study will examine consumer plan choice in the Medicare Part D marketplace; investigate how formulary and benefit design affects competition, utilization, health and spending; and apply comparative effectiveness analysis to identify clinical areas for potential savings.

Use of Behavioral Economics to Improve Treatment of Acute Respiratory Infections

Principal Investigator: Jason N. Doctor, Ph.D.

The University of Southern California School of Pharmacy received an $11.5 million grant to reduce inappropriate antibiotic prescribing for acute respiratory infections through the use of behavioral economics.  Behavioral economics introduces small changes to the clinical environment designed to “nudge” physicians toward guideline compliance without restricting their freedom to choose the treatments they think are best for their patients and is an effort to translate basic behavioral science into clinical research.  The study is a cluster randomized trial involving 42 clinic sites in different regions of the United States and involves researchers from Harvard, Northwestern University, RAND, and UCLA