What We Do

Division of Biostatistics and Health Services Research (BIO) Mission Statement

We deploy statistical expertise to serve scientific discovery, population health, and health equity. We are knowledgeable in biostatistical methods, health services research, health policy, clinical trials design and analysis. Dr. Arlene Ash is BIO’s founding Chief and continues in this role while leading research to improve efficiency and equity in how health care is paid for and quality is measured. We partner with ForHealth (UMass Chan Medical School’s public service consulting and operations division, formerly Commonwealth Medicine) to support MassHealth (our state’s Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program) to evaluate programs, measure quality, and allocate budgets among Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) and plans. We support MassHealth in developing ACO budgets and quality judgments that recognize the combined medical and social risk of plan members. We and ForHealth are the designated Evaluators of MassHealth’s two most recent 5-year 1115 Medicaid waivers from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and our faculty and staff play leading roles in these initiatives. Division-led research also includes international collaborations in developing, deploying, and evaluating school-based HIV prevention programs and developing novel computational methods to analyze large-scale high-throughput data to understand noncoding RNA epigenomics in genetics and disease. We are both independent investigators and collaborative scientists, providing biostatistical and methodological guidance and support to others, mainly through our Research Methods Collaborative (RMC), but also through direct collaborations.