Jennifer Mellor, Ph.D.

Jennifer Mellor, Ph.D., is a professor of economics, director of the Schroeder Center for Health Policy, and faculty affiliate of the Thomas Jefferson Program in Public Policy at the College of William & Mary. Dr. Mellor joined the faculty at William & Mary in 1998. Her current research interests include the determinants of health and changes in health care use and health behaviors during economic downturns. Dr. Mellor’s work has been supported by the Williamsburg Community Health Foundation, TIAA-CREF, National Institute on Aging at the National Institutes of Health, and the Agency for Health Care Policy and Research at the Department of Health and Human Services. Her work has been published in the Journal of Health Economics, the Journal of Health Politics, Policy, and Law, Health Services Research, and Health Economics.

Dr. Mellor received a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Maryland and a B.A. in economics from LaSalle University in Philadelphia. She was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Scholar in Health Policy Research at Yale University.

Since February 2011, Dr. Mellor has been serving as the principal investigator on her first HCFO grant, using Florida ambulatory and inpatient discharge data from 1997 to 2008, together with data from Medstat’s MarketScan database and the American Hospital Association, to study the effects of the Medicare Outpatient Prospective Payment System (OPPS) on volume by payer and site of care. The goal of this research is to determine whether OPPS led hospitals to substitute from Medicare patients toward those with other coverage, or substitute from outpatient toward inpatient care for conditions that can be treated in either setting. Results from this research are expected in the spring of 2012. For more information on Dr. Mellor’s HCFO work visit http://www.hcfo.org/grants/examining-impact-outpatient-prospective-payment-system-hospitals-medicare-volume-and-out-pati