Mahshid Abir

Mahshid Abir is a senior physician policy researcher at the RAND Corporation. Also a practicing emergency physician, Abir's research evaluates the continuum of acute care delivery, including pre-hospital, emergency, inpatient, and ambulatory care, with a focus on policy-related issues pertaining to utilization, quality, efficiency, and acute care outcomes.  Abir's past work includes developing measures for hospital and health care coalition surge capacity funded by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response.  She has also evaluated patient-centered outcomes as part of health system redesign initiatives. During the pandemic, she led COVID-19 related projects including identifying strategies to increase critical-care capacity in intensive care units, identifying strategies to boost COVID-19 vaccine acceptance, and pandemic response in Middle East nations. Further, she led a project funded by HHS/Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation around COVID-19 outcome measures to track the evolution of the pandemic. She co-leads a project funded by the Federal Emergency Management Agency developing a process for allocation of COVID-19 Public Assistance (PA) to hospital PA Applicants. She served as a content expert on two National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) consensus committees focused on lessons learned from COVID-19 for future pandemic response and evaluating ways to secure the U.S. medical supply chain. She has expertise in health services research methods, including mixed quantitative–qualitative methods and community-/stakeholder-based participatory research. Abir received her M.D. from the University of Cincinnati.