Laura Hatfield

Laura Hatfield, PhD, is an associate professor of health care policy (biostatistics). Her research focuses on trade-offs and relationships among health outcomes. In particular, she develops statistical methods that incorporate multiple sources of information, relationships among outcomes, and loss functions to improve decision making. Dr. Hatfield has particular expertise in Bayesian hierarchical modeling.

Dr. Hatfield’s primary methodological contributions are in multiple outcome modeling. From her early work in joint models for longitudinal and survival outcome to recent work on multiple quality measurements, her hierarchical models allow researchers to attribute variation across multiple levels of the data and explore emergent patterns. Recently, Dr. Hatfield has combined patient preferences and regulator loss functions with hierarchical outcome models to improve treatment and safety decision making.

In applied collaborations within HCP and beyond, Dr. Hatfield has studied cardiac medical devices, cancer chemotherapy, physician behavior, health care spending, and delivery system reform. She has evaluated interventions ranging from price transparency initiatives to home care management systems, and from accountable care organizations to patient-centered medical homes. She built a large microsimulation to forecast health care spending, coverage, and outcomes of Medicare beneficiaries. She has modeled temporal and geographic variation in medical device use and outcomes. Inspired by this applied work, Dr. Hatfield is currently working to improve methods for control group selection in observational health services and outcomes research.

Dr. Hatfield received her BS in genetics from Iowa State University and her MS and PhD in biostatistics from the University of Minnesota.