Anna Christensen

Anna Christensen is a director and principal researcher with more than 15 years of experience leading research, data analytics, and program support to measure and improve health care quality. She has expertise developing clinical quality measures and evaluating the impact of quality improvement initiatives. Much of her recent work focuses on maternal and child health (MCH) and perioperative medicine.

Christensen, who came to Mathematica in 2010, currently directs a project to develop and validate a measure of out-of-home placement for use in the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Integrated Care for Kids model. The measure uses administrative data from Medicaid and child welfare agencies. Also for CMS, she developed claims-based tools to monitor MCH outcomes, including severe maternal morbidity and neonatal abstinence syndrome, using Medicaid claims data. She recently evaluated two demonstration programs to improve quality of care for children with medical complexity in Medicaid, under the Health Care Innovation Award, Round 2 evaluation. She also led work to test pediatric clinical quality measures that use electronic health records as the data source. In her work related to perioperative medicine, she leads a project to develop and maintain a risk-adjusted quality measure of intraoperative hypotension that anesthesia providers can report to the CMS Merit-Based Incentive Payment System. She also collaborates with anesthesia providers on studies of perioperative quality improvement.

Formerly, Christensen held research positions at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the Centers for Behavioral & Preventive Medicine at the Miriam Hospital and Brown Medical School. Christensen holds a Ph.D. from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.