Allison Barrett

Allison Barrett is a senior health researcher who specializes in using survey and administrative data to study patterns of health care use and costs. She has expertise in Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP) operations and policy as well as in providing technical assistance and analytic support to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and state Medicaid and CHIP agencies. She led Mathematica’s Medicaid and CHIP Learning Collaboratives project, which operates Learning Collaboratives that enable state and CMS officials to meet and discuss Medicaid policy and operational changes required by the Affordable Care Act.

Barrett also leads Mathematica’s work assessing the usability of the national Transformed Medicaid Statistical Information System (T-MSIS) Analytic Files for research, analysis, and program operations as well as the company’s work using these data to measure program performance. On projects for CMS, the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, she has used the earlier national Medicaid Analytic eXtract data for research purposes. These included developing claims-based outcome measures to track the use and cost of Medicaid-funded services by a variety of populations, such as children, adults with serious mental illness, and disabled beneficiaries using home and community-based services.

In addition to her expertise using administrative Medicaid data, Barrett has extensive experience using state all-payer claims databases (APCDs) for research and analysis. She led Mathematica's work for the Massachusetts Health Policy Commission using the state’s APCD to understand trends in health care spending, providers’ prices, and patients’ health. In work funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, she used the Massachusetts APCD to examine differences in risk selection between subsidized and unsubsidized commercial plans. She also played a lead role in Mathematica's work with Minnesota’s APCD to develop relative measures of provider efficiency and cost.

Barrett has a master’s degree in economics from George Washington University and a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and sociology from Grinnell College.