Sherri Rose, PhD, has won a prestigious award from the American Society of Health Economists for the best published research in health econometrics, specifically a study that developed a novel class of statistical estimators to evaluate the impact of Medicaid managed care plans.

The Willard G. Manning Memorial Award is given for the best published health economics research in econometric methodology or application.

The award-winning paper, Conditional Cross-Design Synthesis Estimators for Generalizability in Medicaid, was published in Biometrics. Rose and her colleagues focused on Medicaid in New York City, developing and applying a novel class of cross-design synthesis estimators that combined randomized and observational data, while addressing the issues of lack of overlap and unmeasured confounding.

Rose, a professor of health policy and co-director of the Health Policy Data Science Lab, has a PhD in biostatistics and conducts research on ethical algorithms in health care, risk adjustment, chronic kidney disease, and health program evaluation with a focus on health equity. Her coauthors and fellow awardees are Jacob Wallace (Yale), Timothy Layton (Harvard), and Health Policy Data Science Lab alumna and first author Irina Degtiar (Mathematica). The work was funded by Rose’s recently completed NIH Director’s New Innovator Award.

As their study notes, the federal Medicaid program provides insurance for low-income and disabled Americans—covering one-fifth of all individuals in the United States. Medicaid spending stood at nearly $806 billion in 2022, or 18% of total national health care expenditures.

Applying their new algorithms, they found substantial differences in health care spending by plan. Individual plan effects could exacerbate existing health disparities for low-income populations.  “This has major implications for our understanding of Medicaid, where this heterogeneity has previously been hidden,” they wrote.

Rose and her coauthors will be honored at the ASHEcon Conference this June in San Diego.