Austin Frakt

Since 2003, Dr. Frakt has served as a Health Economist in Health Care Financing & Economics at the VA Boston Healthcare System. He joined the BU School of Public Health as Assistant Professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management in 2007 and appointed as Assistant professor of Psychiatry, BU School of Medicine in 2011.  Dr. Frakt received his Ph.D. for his work in stochastic modeling from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1999.
Dr. Frakt’s primary research interests include the policy, utilization, and financing of public health care programs with a recent focus on VA and Medicare prescription drug policy, Medicare Part D plans, and the effects of the Medicare Modernization Act of 2003. In addition, Dr. Frakt is studying the health insurance experience of vulnerable non-elderly populations including the disabled. Currently, Dr. Frakt is working on a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation project to study the private fee for service plans in Medicare using the Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey. For the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality and the VA, Dr. Frakt is studying non-elderly veterans and non-veterans who may be disabled and/or uninsured using Medical Expenditure Panel Survey data.

Dr. Frakt’s earlier work includes study of Medicare Part D plan benefits for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. He has also analyzed nursing home resident assessment data (MDS data) for a VA-funded data validation project. He has participated in an American Health Care Association funded project to develop and maintain a longitudinal microsimulation model for the study of financial implications of long-term care policy alternatives and has conducted analyses on numerous Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services funded evaluations, including most recently the evaluation of Medicare private fee for service plans. Additionally, for CMS, he has worked on evaluations of community nursing organizations, state health insurance high-risk pools, and Medicare competitive pricing. In two separate projects, one for the state of Minnesota and one for Massachusetts, Dr. Frakt has studied case-mix based Medicaid nursing home prospective payment options. For the Heinz Family Foundation, Dr. Frakt developed a microsimulation model for analysis of a Massachusetts senior pharmacy benefit program. Lastly, as part of an Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality project, he explored the feasibility of the application of probabilistic risk assessment techniques to the study of medical errors.

Contact:

Health Care Financing & Economics (152H)
VA Boston Healthcare System Research & Development
150 South Huntington Avenue
Boston, MA  02130
Voice:  (857) 364-6064
Fax:  (857) 364-4511
E-mail:  frakt@bu.edu
E-mail: austin.frakt@va.gov