The Department has expanded its focus on the economics of health care and health policy by establishing the Center for Health Economic Modeling in 2021, directed by Professor John Graves, PhD.
The Department has also expanded its faculty who have research interests in this area, which uses statistical models to estimate the value in health care. Assistant Professors Ashley Leech, PhD, and Jinyi Zhu, PhD have joined the Department in the past 5 years and have interests in measuring cost effectiveness and value in health care. Their research aims to estimate the value in health care, or the relative improvement in quality of life or health outcomes relative to the costs, financial and otherwise, to the patient, insurance plan, facility, or provider.
The Center partners often with other Departments on campus in its work, including the Departments of Biostatistics and Biomedical Informatics, and most recently the Vanderbilt Institute for Global Health.
