Healthcare Bench Expands at Abt

Amy Cowell offers over 15 years of experience as a researcher, consultant, and team leader. She manages interdisciplinary teams to find solutions to some of the most difficult challenges faced by federal and state health agencies as well as industry clients. She is a skilled leader adept in business development, technical and scientific leadership, and client and staff management. Cowell has significant management experience with large, multi-task projects for the federal government, including budgeting, contracting, and supervision of project staff and contractors. She has led cross-functional teams that researched and evaluated oncology and joint replacement value-based care models for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), and she has supported the development, endorsement, and maintenance of quality measures for home health and home and community-based services. Additionally, her expertise includes management of large monitoring and evaluation projects for the U.S. Defense Center for Public Health, where she oversaw the implementation of multiple large-scale pilot programs and served as a subject matter expert for multiple working groups and committees that advise senior military leaders on evidence-based health practices.

Luke Horvath is a health and social services researcher with 10 years of experience analyzing the impacts of healthcare, housing, education, and nutrition policies. He began his career working at the Wilson Sheehan Lab for Economic Opportunities at the University of Notre Dame, an innovative anti-poverty research center that partners with local social service agencies to conduct rigorous experimental and quasi-experimental evaluations. In recent years, he has primarily focused on implementing and evaluating alternative payment models designed to lower healthcare costs and improve quality, including beneficiary attribution for accountable care organizations. At Abt, in addition to continuing this work, Horvath works at the intersection of health and social services. He is interested in diverse topics, including providing healthcare for low-income populations, improving pain management outcomes, and increasing affordable housing access. Over his career he has come to believe that effective policy grows out of local understanding and that multiple layers of policy, race, gender, and access interact to determine program effectiveness.

Dr. Eric Lammers is a health economist whose work addresses healthcare delivery and public health systems innovations, quality measurement, and payment policy. He leads analytic tasks for a new home health quality measure of patient functional status and produces health equity performance reports for the CMS Home Health Quality Reporting Program, along with other home health quality measure reporting tasks. His evaluation research spans a variety of innovations in the delivery of care, including studies of telehealth to enable care access in rural areas, home health care value-based payment policy, emergency department care management, and behavioral health care interventions for children. Lammers has led and contributed to quantitative impact studies of such innovations’ effects on utilization, costs, and quality of care. He provides expertise in causal inference, comparison group selection, propensity score matching, predictive models, generalized linear models and other methods for complex impact and mixed methods evaluations. He has extensive experience performing analyses using Medicare and Medicaid claims and presenting research in peer-reviewed journals, reports to federal agencies, and presentations that integrate quantitative and qualitative results.

Jessica McNab, MHAP, has more than 13 years of experience developing, implementing, evaluating, and translating health programs for an array of federal and state clients to improve the cost, quality, experience, and equity of healthcare for vulnerable populations. She has led and supported the design and facilitation of qualitative evaluation, stakeholder engagement, technical assistance (TA), and dissemination activities. She operationalized formative evaluations for federal and state clients. She engaged persons with lived experience and communities in recommendations to improve state Medicaid policy. McNab has also led the development of learning systems and other TA and dissemination activities for several CMS Innovation Center alternative payment models. Through these efforts, she develops curriculum with activities and resources, like learning collaboratives and case studies, to help participants learn from their peers and build capacity to sustain and scale their innovations. McNab supports participants like federal and state staff; health centers and systems; providers and other clinicians; patients and persons in the community; and community-based organizations. McNab’s work is informed by her background in continuous quality improvement and patient safety and her formative years as a licensed social worker.

Beenu Puri has 19 years of experience in client management, process improvements, data quality, requirements specification, and managing large, complex projects for Centers for Medicare and Medicaid clients. She comes to us from Mathematica, where she was a director in their Health Unit and oversaw staffing and performance of early career and senior staff. As a director, she mentored a team of supervisors to help their staff achieve their development goals and advised project leaders on how to manage their teams to meet their project goals and deliverables. Puri has a master’s in public policy, has been a certified Project Management Professional (PMP) since 2010, and earned a certificate in Lean Six Sigma in 2014. She is currently working toward a Certificate in Management from Harvard Business School Online, where she’s studied management essentials and strategy execution. As the operations director, Puri manages day-to-day oversight of the healthcare portfolio and supports execution of key projects. She also supports improvements activities across the firm and collaborates with the capability organizations, the chief growth officer, and Abt departments to ensure client success and strong contract and financial performance.