Amber Sabbatini, MD, MPH

I am a practicing emergency physician and federally-funded health services researcher with expertise in using claims and administrative datasets to understand how the delivery of emergency care affects patient outcomes, resource utilization, and quality. To date, much of my research has revolved around examining hospital admission practices and their consequences, including a special emphasis on observation care. Most recently, I have been awarded several federal and foundation grants to study the impact of payer policies and delivery reforms on health utilization and costs and their intersection with emergency care. These include a pilot award from the UW Population Health Initiative to examine the association between behavioral health integration under Washington state’s Medicaid Transformation Program and preventable ED use, an R34 from NIMH to study the impacts of state Medicaid policies targeting high-utilizers of the ED on mental health outcomes and a newly awarded R01 from the NIA to study how Medicare policies including the Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program have affected the growth of observation stays and impacted outcomes for older adults requiring hospitalization. I am currently appointed as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Emergency Medicine and Adjunct Assistant Professor of Health Services at the University of Washington. I am additionally an affiliate faculty member for the Center for Health Innovation & Policy Science (CHIPS) and a core faculty in the Department of Emergency Medicine’s Section of Population Health. After completing my emergency medicine training in 2012, I undertook a health services research fellowship at the University of Michigan. I then joined the faculty at University of Washington and was subsequently awarded a K12 career development award in patient-centered outcomes research from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. I have been actively involved in the implementation of Washington state’s Medicaid Transformation Project in King County and serve on multiple workgroups related to improving care coordination and ED utilization among high-needs Medicaid patients. These activities complement my current grant-funded research in the Medicaid space and provide a stakeholder network for translating research into policy. I maintain active membership in the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine (SAEM) and American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP). I served on the SAEM grants committee for several years, and currently serve on the ACEP Patient Safety & Quality and Research committees. Finally, this past summer I served as a reviewer on an NHLBI R21 Special Emphasis Panel focusing on secondary analyses of existing datasets.