Eric W. Christensen, Ph.D.

Eric Christensen, Ph.D., managing director of the CNA Center for Health Research and Policy, is a health economist with diverse experience covering health professions retention and compensation, medical infrastructure, health system governance, disability compensation, and chronic care models. His training and experience includes diverse methods including econometric modeling, longitudinal and cross-section analysis, and survey design and implementation.

Christensen has taken on many high-level projects over his career. This includes a current effort to evaluate the impact of the Navy’s patient-centered medical home model on assess, quality, and cost. This includes an evaluation of assess and quality through patient and staff satisfaction surveys and adherence to clinical practice guidelines. Similarly, he evaluated utilization and cost impacts through an econometric model to determine impacts on inpatient, outpatient, emergency room, pharmacy, and ancillary services use.

In 2007, he completed a comprehensive analysis of the earnings and quality-of-life losses for service-disabled veterans relative to their non-service-disabled peers for the congressionally mandated Veterans’ Disability Benefits Commission. This analysis also compared differences in the disability ratings for service members evaluated in both the Department of Defense (DoD) and Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) systems. These analyses directly led to many of the Commission’s recommendations and to the integration of the DoD and VA disability evaluation systems.

Similarly, Christensen provided direct analyst support to the Department of the Navy Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) Office on medical infrastructure issues for the BRAC 2005 process. This included direct support for the Medical Joint Cross-Service Group which was responsible for making medical infrastructure recommendations for military treatment facilities. Specifically, he developed a constrained optimization model to maximize the military value of medical infrastructure subject to reducing the infrastructure to the minimum level needed to meet requirements.

In 2005, Christensen received the Superior Public Service Award from the Department of the Navy. He has a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, a M.A. in economics from Colorado State University, and a B.S. in business management (finance) from Brigham Young University.