Dr. Zeynal Karaca is a Senior Economist and the program director for market analytics and research portfolio at the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). He is also the senior advisor of the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project (HCUP), leading the development of nationwide and statewide databases and many analytic tools, all designed to enhance the capacity to conduct rigorous economic and policy analysis. In his research, he has analyzed issues related to pricing and competition in the market for physician and hospital services; examined the factors affecting physician practice styles and resource utilization; investigated the determinants of hospital payments and costs; explored service utilization, enrollment, competition in managed care organizations, and the role of quality in the hospital services market and the impact of market forces on health care cost, access, and quality. His work appears in journals such as Health Affairs, Health Services Research, Inquiry, Medical Care, Medical Care Research and Review, American Journal of Managed Care, Production and Operation Management, International Journal of Health Economics, BMC Health Services Research and BMC Emergency Medicine.
Dr. Karaca is also an Adjunct Faculty at McCourt School of Public Health in Georgetown University teaching graduate level Health Economics classes. Prior joining federal government, Dr. Karaca worked for four years as a Research Scientist at Social and Scientific Systems providing support to various federal government programs. Prior that, he worked as a consultant for three years at Avalere Health, solving business problems for companies listed in S&P 500 Index. Dr. Karaca has received his Ph.D. in Economics at Texas A&M University.