Seminar Series: Carrie Colla

Carrie Colla, PhD, is a health economist and an associate professor at The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice at The Geisel School of Medicine in Hanover, New Hampshire. Her research focuses on physician payment, health insurance markets, and insurance benefit design and is aimed at policies that will improve the quality, accessibility and cost of health care. Colla teaches microeconomics and health policy at Dartmouth College.

At The Dartmouth Institute, much of Colla’s collaborative and investigator-initiated research is dedicated to examining health system performance and the effectiveness of payment and delivery system reforms, including accountable care organizations (ACOs). She has been the principal investigator for the annual National Survey of ACOs since its inception in 2012. Analysis of National Survey of ACOs data is regularly used to guide decisions of health care leaders and policymakers about the future of ACOs and payment reform.

Colla’s work is funded by The National Institute on Aging, The Commonwealth Fund, The Donaghue Foundation, and The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. She is a lead investigator in Dartmouth’s Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality Center of Excellence to Study High-Performing Health Care Systems. Specific empirical studies include: the effects of changes in Medicare reimbursement for physicians and institutional providers (including accountable care payment reforms) on high need, high cost patients; the prevalence and drivers of low-value health care services; costs, use, and outcomes of post-acute care; labor market effects of health insurance expansions; and employer health benefit choices under an employer mandate. As the author of over 50 original articles, Colla’s research has appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association, Health Affairs, and other peer-reviewed journals.

Colla received her undergraduate degree from Dartmouth College, and her MA in Economics and PhD in Health Policy (Economics track) from the University of California, Berkeley. She is the past recipient of a SYNERGY Career Development Award from the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences. She is theme leader in Payment and Delivery Reform for the Academy Health Annual Research Meeting, is on the advisory board for Healthcare: The Journal of Delivery Science and Innovation, and acts as an advisor to the Payment Reform Evaluation Project.