Randall Brown, Ph.D.

Dr. Brown is Director of Health Research at Mathematica Policy Research. He specializes in evaluation design and in studies of care coordination, primary care reform, and long term care. He has led many ASPE- and CMS-funded studies over the past 30 years, and currently directs Mathematica’s evaluations of two large CMS programs – the Comprehensive Primary Care Initiative, and the Round 2 Health Care Innovations Awards. Much of his work is focused on bringing the strongest and most robust methodological approaches to program evaluations, and providing clear, heuristic interpretation for policymakers on why the results from these methods differ from conventional analysis. He is currently introducing Bayesian to evaluation of CMS initiatives, and developing innovative methods to link program induced changes in care delivery to improved outcomes. Dr. Brown and his colleagues received the AcademyHealth 2009 Impact Award for their evaluation of the Cash and Counseling Demonstration, as well as Paper of the Year awards from AcademyHealth and from National Institute for Health Care Management in 2010 for their Journal of the American Medical Association article on their evaluation the Medicare Coordinated Care Demonstration. He is a member of AcademyHealth’s Methods Council, and has given methods workshops at AcademyHealth’s annual meeting on several topics, including equivalence testing, orthogonal designs, and using Bayesian methods to improve evaluations of demonstration programs and initiatives. Dr. Brown received a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Wisconsin.