Abigail Barker is the faculty lead for data and methods at the Center for Health Economics and Policy at the Institute for Public Health. Her role includes helping social science and clinical researchers add cost and cost-effectiveness analyses to their work to increase policy relevance, as well as creating data visualizations to allow stakeholders to interactively understand the tradeoffs of various health policy choices.
Her own research focuses on econometric modeling and microsimulations on topics relating to health insurance markets, Medicaid, payment policy, and health reform. Her ongoing work for the Rural Policy Research Institute focuses on understanding how markets can be successfully integrated into the health care sector, using the Affordable Care Act and Health Insurance Marketplaces data as well as Medicare Advantage data to inform rural health policy. A newer research area is nutrition and food policy, as these are potential levers that can affect health in a more upstream and potentially cost-effective manner.
