Spring 2024 Data Science Seminar Series
Theodoros Giannouchos–Health Insurance Claims Data and Quasi-experimental Methods to Evaluate Outcomes of Health Policies: The Case of State-level Caps on Patients’ Out-of-pocket Spending for Insulin

Speaker: Theodoros Giannouchos, Ph.D., M.S., MPharm., Assistant Professor, Dept. of Health Policy & Organization, School of Public Health, The University of Alabama at Birmingham

Faculty Host: Hye-Chung Kum, HPMG

Description: Evaluation of the impact of health policies on outcomes is critical to inform stakeholders about their effectiveness and the potential need to address pitfalls through alterations, or even remove or expand policies. The advent of large secondary healthcare databases across multiple years and settings that enable longitudinal follow-up can provide insight on individuals’ health services utilization patterns and behavior. These databases, combined with econometric methods, can be used to isolate and estimate causal effects of health policies on targeted outcomes if certain criteria are met. In this presentation, multiplayer state-level medical and pharmaceutical claims and health insurance enrollment data coupled with a quasi-experimental design are used to explore changes in health outcomes after the enactment of a state-level policy that capped individuals’ own payments for insulin.

Biography: Dr. Giannouchos is an Assistant Professor with the Department of Health Policy & Organization, School of Public Health, at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He is also the Program Director of the MSPH in Outcomes Research and an Associate Scientist at UAB’s Center for Outcomes and Effectiveness Research and Education (COERE). He is a graduate of Texas A&M University and received his PhD in Health Services Research with a Health Economics concentration from the Department of Health Policy & Management, School of Public Health in 2020. He specializes in quantitative econometric methods and data analysis to conduct health services, health economics and outcomes research, and cost-effectiveness analyses. Dr. Giannouchos’s research interests include health services utilization and patient preferences, health outcomes, policy evaluation, and comparative effectiveness. He uses large secondary healthcare-related databases to conduct his research, such as administrative datasets, and multi-payer medical and pharmaceutical claims data. His ongoing research focuses on frequent use of emergency services and revisits, racial and geographic disparities in health outcomes, and the evaluation of policies that affect healthcare services utilization and outcomes.

Link to PDF version

You can also click this link to join the seminar

For more information about TAMIDS Seminar Series, please contact Ms. Jennifer South at jsouth@tamu.edu