Nadine K. Zawadzki, Ph.D.

Nadine K Zawadzki, PhD, MPH is a health economist in FTI’s Center for Healthcare Economics and Policy. Dr. Zawadzki has broad experience conducting health economics and outcomes research quantifying value in health and pharmaceutical innovations and policy. Dr. Zawadzki’s research covers a wide range of areas including patient outcomes and health policy research, real-world evidence generation with big health data, and economic modeling. Dr. Zawadzki’s research employs advanced and state-of-the-art econometric methods including time-varying difference-in-differences casual frameworks, doubly robust matching and instrumental variable inference techniques, and clinical prediction modeling with machine learning. Dr. Zawadzki has authored numerous peer-reviewed publications and her work has been selected for podium presentations at scientific congresses.

Outcomes & Policy Research. Dr. Zawadzki has served as Primary Investigator on research funded by the EuroQol Foundation to design and analyze a prospective, longitudinal survey to measure regional and temporal variations in health-related quality of life during the pandemic. She additionally conducted a policy analysis to investigate the effect of US COVID-19 policy stringency on health-related quality of life at varying levels of perceived health risk. Dr. Zawadzki has worked with health economics and outcomes researchers in the biopharmaceutical industry to design a discrete choice experiment to elicit patient and caregiver preferences for Hemophilia A treatment.

Real-World Evidence. Dr. Zawadzki’s research has leveraged ‘big’ health data to investigate use patterns and comparative effectiveness of high-cost medications in the intensive care unit setting to inform health system resource allocation. Dr. Zawadzki has collaborated with an interdisciplinary team of pharmacists and clinicians to evaluate the effect of a virtual ambulatory pharmacy service to optimize pharmacotherapy for heart failure patients covered under Medicare’s Direct Contracting Model, for which she devised a novel algorithm to link electronic health records to commercial pharmacy dispensing data to capture patient drug use over time. Dr. Zawadzki has also conducted retrospective analyses of the health and economic burden of MRSA and MSSA hospital readmissions and evaluated the benefits of continuous inotropic therapy in end-stage heart failure using registry and insurance claims data.

Economic Modeling. Dr. Zawadzki has worked with the leadership of the Familial Hypercholesterolemia Foundation to design an economic model to assess the value of modern screening and treatment strategies for heterozygous familial hypercholesterolemia in the US.

Dr. Zawadzki received a BS in Public Health, summa cum laude, with a minor in Business from Tulane University, a MPH in Health Policy from Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, and a PhD in Health Economics from University of Southern California