Evelyn Li's work covers a wide range of topics related to containing the growing cost of hospital care, including the transparency in hospital costs and prices, potentially avoidable hospital utilization, and hospital global budgets. She has extensive experience with global budget methodologies, hospital cost and quality performance measures, non-experimental research design, data visualization, rural health, Medicare claims, and commercial insurance price data.
Li currently directs a project for the National Academy for State Health Policy (NASHP), producing a visual tool widely used by states to perform analyses on hospital costs. She also directs a project that develops an analytic system for reporting and benchmarking hospital performance on financial and quality metrics using Medicare hospital cost report data. In addition, she leads the Medicare global budgeting and payment methodology related to hospital global budgets for the Pennsylvania Rural Health Model. Previously, she played substantial roles on impact evaluations for the CMS Innovation Center, including Comprehensive Primary Care Plus, Independence at home, and the Round Two of the Health Care Innovation Awards, where her work focused on care for frail older adults.
Li’s research has been published in top-tier journals such as the Journal of Health Economics, Health Economics, Health Services Research, Medical Care, and Medical Care Research & Review. Before joining Mathematica, Li served as an assistant professor in the Milken Institute School of Public Health at George Washington University, where she taught Health Economics and Financing and Benefit-Cost Analysis in Healthcare. She holds a Ph.D. in economics from Lehigh University.