Bio: Franco Sassi, a 2000-01 Commonwealth Fund Harkness Fellow in Health Care Policy, is a lecturer in Health Policy in the Department of Social Policy and Administration at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). He has been course director for the Masters of Science in Health Policy, Planning and Financing, run jointly by LSE and the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine since 1995. In 1994, Sassi was a visiting fellow at Duke University's Center for Health Policy Research and Education participating in the Stroke Prevention PORT project. He also held visiting positions at the University of California, Berkeley, at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart, Rome, and, during his Harkness Fellowship, at the University of California, San Francisco and at Harvard University. Sassi has served as a temporary advisor to the European office of the World Health Organization on a range of issues including cost-effectiveness of health care services, reshaping health systems towards health outcomes, and health care quality management. Sassi's research interests focus on the economic analysis of health services, including the evaluation of diagnostic and screening interventions, multi-attribute utility assessment techniques for measuring health outcomes, measures of equity in economic analysis, and inequalities in health and access to health care. He also served on the research team that conducted an analysis of health interventions in the 15 European Union Member States. Sassi's early career was spent as a journalist, publishing over 50 articles on economics and management issues. He is also editor of the Cochrane Collaboration Health Economics Methods Group Newsletter. An economist, Sassi received his Ph.D. from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
Placement: University of California
Mentors: Harold Luft, Ph.D.
Project: Variations in the Uptake of Preventive Health Services and their Impact on Health Differentials by Race/ Ethnicity and Socioeconomic Condition
Description: The aim of Sassi's study was to assess and compare patterns over time of breast and cervical cancer screening and stage at diagnosis. The analysis examined the relationship between these trends and a number of possible predictors, including age, race/ethnicity, income, education, and insurance status. The study used data collected as part of large population surveys and registries, including the Commonwealth Fund Survey of Women's Health, Medical Expenditure Panel Survey, Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, and cancer registries in eight states.