Kan Gianattasio, PhD, is a senior research scientist, where she applies over a decade of experience in epidemiology, health policy, and economics. Kan leads and contributes to the design and execution of complex quantitative analyses for multiple NORC projects. She specializes in using large-scale health datasets, including CMS Medicare claims and national survey data, to address critical public health issues, such as dementia, aging, and health care policy. Her expertise in statistical analysis, causal inference, and quasi-experimental design allows her to extract meaningful insights from large data sources and inform healthcare policy improvements.

Kan’s analytical expertise is showcased in her role as the analytical lead for a National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded project developing a dementia surveillance system in the United States. This high-impact project leverages Medicare data to track dementia trends and outcomes, underscoring her skills in data processing and validation. Additionally, she serves as a key researcher in the evaluation of CMMI models, such as the Next Generation Accountable Care Organization (NGACO) and Pennsylvania Rural Health Model (PARHM), where she leads quantitative assessments of their effects on healthcare delivery and spending.

Before joining NORC, Kan was a senior research associate at George Washington University, where she led a mixed-methods evaluation of Medicare hospice policy changes and their impact on patient outcomes and provider behavior. She also developed novel algorithms to identify dementia in large datasets, such as the Health and Retirement Study, which were used to assess disparities in dementia diagnosis. Kan’s earlier roles at the Brookings Institution involved analyzing socioeconomic outcomes and trends in the U.S. labor force, further sharpening her quantitative research skills and reinforcing her expertise in health services research.

Gianattasio has conducted notable research on Alzheimer’s disease, related dementias, and Medicare policy. Her forthcoming publication in JAMA Network Open (2024) focuses on case definitions for diagnosed Alzheimer’s in Medicare. She has also examined the impact of Medicare hospice policy changes on live discharge rates and length-of-stay (Journal of Pain and Symptom Management, 2023) and the effects of federal policy changes on hospice use for individuals with Alzheimer’s (JAMA Health Forum, 2022). Additionally, her work has explored the generalizability of clinical findings to community-based samples (Alzheimer’s and Dementia, 2021), trends in dementia incidence and prevalence across racial groups (JAMA Neurology, 2021), the development of algorithmic dementia ascertainment for research on outcomes (Epidemiology, 2020), and methods for classifying dementia status in national studies (Epidemiology, 2019). 

In Later Retirement, Inequality in Old Age, and the Growing Gap in Longevity between Rich and Poor (2016), co-authored with Barry Bosworth, Gary Burtless, and Kevin Zhang, she explores how retirement patterns and economic outcomes contribute to the growing longevity gap between rich and poor.