Alison Evans Cuellar, Ph.D., M.B.A.

Alison Evans Cuellar, Ph.D., M.B.A., is an associate professor of health administration and policy at the George Mason University College of Health and Human Services. She has studied health care systems, Medicaid, mental health, and populations who interact with the criminal justice system. She has evaluated new types of hospital and physician organizations and their effects on quality, efficiency, costs, prices, and technology adoption.  Currently, she is supporting a study panel on addressing pricing power in health care markets and is engaged in an NIH-funded study of employer wellness programs.  In other work supported by the National Institute of Mental Health and private foundations, Dr. Cuellar has examined a variety of behavioral health and Medicaid policy issues as they relate to juveniles and adults in the justice systems.

Dr. Cuellar received her Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley and holds a Masters of Business Administration from the University of Texas at Austin. Previously, Dr. Cuellar was an assistant professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University. She was a member of a national collaborative Mental Health Policy network convened by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Dr. Cuellar is a co-editor of the Economic Grand Rounds column in the journal Psychiatric Services and serves on the editorial board of Medical Care Research and Review. She has published her own research in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, the Journal of Health Economics, the American Journal of Public Health, and Health Affairs, among other journals.

In Dr. Cuellar’s HCFO-funded grant, she and her colleagues are evaluating a customized price transparency tool offered by a large national insurer. They are using enrollment, claims, and web utilization data from the insurer and focusing on a broad range of clinical conditions in order to (1) identify the salient characteristics of tool users; and (2) estimate the impact of tool availability on provider choice, service utilization, and costs. The goal of this project is to inform ongoing and future price transparency policies, including the use of consumer information tools.

Additional information about Dr. Cuellar’s HCFO-funded work is available here. More information on her research and a list of selected publications can be found here.

This project was funded as part of the Foundation’s solicitation “Understanding the Use and Impact of Price Data in Health Care.”