Laurie Felland

Laurie Felland has more than 20 years of experience conducting research on the organization, delivery, and financing of health care in the United States. She is a qualitative researcher skilled in interviewing leaders of organizations and agencies, analyzing qualitative data, and disseminating findings that are useful to policymakers and private decision makers. Her work focuses on care for people with low incomes and other vulnerable populations, and includes studies of safety net providers, public insurance programs, and efforts to improve access to care for people who lack insurance coverage.

Recently, Felland has contributed to several Medicaid and Medicare evaluations. For the California Department of Health Care Services, she leads the qualitative assessment of the Dental Transformation Initiative, which aims to improve oral health care for children enrolled in Medi-Cal. For the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Innovation at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, she researches how primary care practices participating in Comprehensive Primary Care Plus—the largest reform of primary care payment and delivery ever tested in this country—are implementing care delivery changes, what helps practices reduce their hospitalization rates, and practices’ plans for sustaining care delivery changes after the model ends.

Felland is the former director of qualitative research at the Center for Studying Health System Change. She directed studies of changes among providers and payers in local health care markets, including qualitative components of the Community Tracking Study (a longitudinal study of 12 health care markets primarily funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation) and a study of seven California health care regions for the California Health Care Foundation. Felland holds an M.S. in health policy and management from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.