Brenda Spillman is a senior fellow and health economist in the Urban Institute’s Health Policy Center. She is principal investigator for the long-term evaluation of Section 2703 Medicaid Health Homes, an initiative to improve outcomes for beneficiaries with multiple chronic conditions by integrating delivery of health, behavioral, and supportive services. Brenda is also coinvestigator and leadership team member for the National Health and Aging Trends Study, a longitudinal survey of the Medicare elderly. With more than 25 years of experience designing and conducting health and health care-related research projects, Brenda has expertise in survey design and in using a broad range of complex national surveys, Medicare and Medicaid claims, and assessment data.

She is a nationally recognized expert on old-age disability, long-term care use and financing, informal caregiving, and projections of service use and cost for the Medicare elderly. Brenda’s earlier work examined the nonelderly uninsured, Medicaid, Medicare, and the impact of financing on acute health care utilization. Before joining Urban in 1998, she was a research fellow at what is now the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. She has a PhD from the Maxwell School, Syracuse University.