Pragya Kakani
Weill Medical College of Cornell University, NY·Public Health & Epidemiology·Early-career
What happens to older adults' health care when big retailers start running doctors' offices? Good access to primary care providers (PCPs), the physicians and advanced practice providers who handle everyday care, is linked to better health.
- Fields
Public Health & Epidemiology
Social Science
Medicine & Clinical Research
- Topics
health services research
health policy
health economics
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Dec 2030
What they work on
- Compare the neighborhoods, primary care providers and older adult patients of retailer-owned primary care clinics (such as those owned by CVS, Walgreens, Walmart and Amazon) with other practices to identify implications for access and quality.
- Estimate the impact of retailer-owned primary care clinics on access to and quality of care for adults 65 and older, using advanced statistical methods for causal inference.
- Characterize, through qualitative research, how healthcare executives, clinic primary care providers and specialists view the factors that shape care delivery for older adults at retailer-owned clinics.
More about the research
Primary care is especially important for coordinating the complex needs of an aging population. In recent years, major pharmacy chains and retailers have poured money into primary care. Walgreens invested over $6 billion in VillageMD, CVS bought Oak Street Health for $10.6 billion, Walmart opened 51 Health Centers, and Amazon, which runs a mail-order pharmacy, bought One Medical for $3.9 billion. Many of these retailer-owned clinics target adults 65 and older, seeing a chance to profit from value-based Medicare contracts. Their effects on access to and quality of care are unknown.
Why it matters
Corporate ownership is reshaping primary care for people on Medicare. Evidence on whether retailer-owned clinics improve or harm access to and quality of care for adults 65 and older could inform clinicians, patients and payers. It could also guide policymakers working to improve primary care and regulators who review healthcare mergers and acquisitions.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Nina Bickell
Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, NY·Public Health & Epidemiology
Use NYC-wide visit data on 12 million patients to describe how mixed or uniform outpatient practices are by insurance and other factors, and test links to quality measures in pediatric preventive care, obstetric procedures and chronic disease management.
Sherri Rose
Stanford University, CA·Mathematics & Statistics
Develop microsimulation models of the health care system's cause-and-effect network to estimate how an algorithm would affect access, quality and costs before deployment, using billing claims, primary care records and qualitative data.
Samira Soleimanpour
University of California-San Francisco, CA·Public Health & Epidemiology
Survey a nationally representative sample of school-based health centers on staffing models and care delivery practices, and create a standard classification system for SBHC research and design.
The school
Weill Medical College of Cornell University: 35 labs on PI Pages, $1.6B a year on research, 59 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
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