I’m Amanda Davis, a health services and policy researcher focused on healthcare participation among high-need Medicare populations, particularly dual-eligible beneficiaries and older adults with complex social and functional needs.

My research sits at the intersection of policy, care delivery, and lived experience, driven by a central question: Why do healthcare reforms designed to expand access and improve self-management so often fail the patients who need them most? 

I study how healthcare systems rely on patients to navigate insurance, use digital health tools, coordinate care, and manage chronic illness, and what happens when those expectations collide with cognitive, functional, social, and structural constraints. My work seeks to inform policies and care models that make participation in healthcare realistically achievable, not simply theoretically available.

What Distinguishes My Research

Before becoming a health services researcher, I spent nearly two decades working inside the healthcare systems I now study. I led analytics, population health, and value-based care initiatives across health plans and healthcare organizations, working at the intersection of data, policy, operations, and care delivery.

That experience continues to shape both the questions I ask and how I interpret the answers. I am interested not only in whether policies, programs, and healthcare innovations work, but why they work for some populations and not others, how healthcare organizations recognize those differences, and what they can do differently as a result.

I completed my PhD in Health Services Research at Boston University School of Public Health in 2025, bringing together my experience in healthcare leadership with formal training in health services and policy research. Today, my work spans research, teaching, and applied healthcare practice, with each informing the others.

Teaching

I teach graduate students at Boston University School of Public Health, where I draw heavily on my experience in healthcare leadership. My courses emphasize applying evidence, analytics, and critical thinking to real-world healthcare problems and helping students move from defining a problem to interpreting evidence and developing recommendations that healthcare leaders can act on.

Connecting Research and Practice

I continue to work with healthcare organizations on analytics, population health, and value-based care strategy. This work provides an ongoing connection to the operational challenges facing healthcare organizations and often generates new questions for my research and teaching.

Across these settings, I am increasingly interested in how healthcare organizations move beyond producing more data and analytics to asking better questions, making better decisions, and translating information into action.