Abigail R. Barker, PhD
Associate Director for Policy Partnerships, Center for Advancing Health Services, Policy & Economics Research
- Email: arbarker@wustl.edu
Additional Titles: Research Associate Professor, Brown School
Abigail Barker, PhD, is affiliated with the Center for Advancing Health Services, Policy & Economics Research at the Institute for Public Health. She also provides economic analysis for the Rural Policy Research Institute in the area of rural health policy. Her role in the Center for Advancing Health Services, Policy & Economics Research includes helping social science and clinical researchers add cost and cost-effectiveness analyses to their work as a way of increasing policy relevance, as well as providing data visualization assistance to allow stakeholders to interact with policy data.
Dr. Barker’s current work focuses on understanding how markets can be successfully integrated into the healthcare sector, using the Affordable Care Act and Health Insurance Marketplace data as well as Medicare Advantage data to inform this question. Further, analyses of rising healthcare spending have prompted a new interest in food policy, as she works to understand how tax-and-subsidize policies can influence food choices and, ultimately, nutrition and health at the population level.