Risha Gidwani is a senior policy researcher at the RAND Corporation. She is also an associate adjunct professor at the UCLA School of Public Health where she teaches cost-effectiveness analysis.
Gidwani's work focuses on benefit design, value of care, and patient financial burden, using both econometric and cost-effectiveness analysis techniques. She has studied quality and costs of care, patient-reported outcomes including utility elicitation, racial/ethnic disparities, and value-based purchasing.
Gidwani has been principal investigator on multiple peer-reviewed studies evaluating the cost and quality of U.S. health care. Her research has been published in peer-reviewed journals such as Health Affairs, JAMA Network Open, and Medical Care, among others. She is currently leading separate studies evaluating the impact of insurance benefit design on receipt of high-quality health care, investigating patient challenges with health insurance literacy, and evaluating how the COVID-19 pandemic affected hospital financial performance.
Prior to coming to RAND, she was a health economist at the VA Health Economics Resource Center (HERC), a core investigator at the VA Center for Innovation to Implementation (Ci2i), and a consulting assistant professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine. Gidwani received her Doctor of Public Health (Dr.P.H.) degree from the UCLA Department of Health Services.
Dr.P.H. in health services, UCLA
Hindi (conversational); Spanish (conversational)
Adjunct Associate Professor, UCLA School of Public Health
