Laura Kimmey

Laura Kimmey’s work focuses on the use, cost, and quality of health care, particularly among adults with chronic illnesses, frail older adults, and beneficiaries dually eligible for Medicare and Medicaid. She has a deep understanding of home-based care as well as consolidation among health care providers.

Kimmey serves as project director for the evaluation of the Independence at Home Demonstration. The evaluation tests whether a payment incentive and service delivery model for providing home-based primary care to chronically ill and functionally limited Medicare beneficiaries reduces spending and improves health outcomes. She serves as a subject matter expert in home-based care for the Value Based Care learning system, which provides peer-to-peer learning and technical assistance to health care organizations participating in Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services accountable care organization and kidney care models. In this role, she provides actionable information for organizations that want to implement or improve home-based care programs and develops and facilitates small- and large-group events. Previously, she used quasi-experimental methods to evaluate a community-based palliative care program treating Medicare beneficiaries with life-limiting illnesses. Her expertise in health care consolidation includes developing the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality’s Compendium of U.S. Health Systems, 2018—a publicly available data resource that enumerates and describes all health systems in the United States. She also studied whether providers in health systems are less likely to deliver commonly needed hospital and outpatient services to patients facing social disadvantages relative to those without disadvantages.

Kimmey, who joined Mathematica in 2011, has published in Health Affairs, Health Services Research, Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, and Journal of Comparative Effectiveness Research. Kimmey holds a Ph.D. in health policy with a minor in economics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an MPA from the University of Georgia.