Dr. Prachi Sanghavi is an Associate Professor in the Department of Public Health Sciences, Biological Sciences Division at the University of Chicago. Her research focuses on health policy evaluation, with expertise in the analysis of large administrative healthcare datasets using causal inference methods. She is co-director of the Health Policy Data Lab at the University of Chicago, a key institutional resource supporting health policy research through Medicare and Medicaid claims data.
Dr. Sanghavi’s scholarship examines critical but understudied areas of health policy. Her work on pre-hospital and emergency care decisions has challenged conventional approaches in emergency medical services, demonstrating that “scoop-and-run” approaches may be more effective than on-site intensive interventions for medical emergencies. Her research on public reporting systems for health and healthcare safety includes significant work on nursing home quality measures, identifying substantial inaccuracies in self-reported safety indicators in the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ Nursing Home Care Compare system. Her current work also explores applications of artificial intelligence to analyze the vast qualitative data in regulatory inspection reports. She also conducts methodological work on the quality and appropriate use of administrative health data.
Dr. Sanghavi’s research portfolio includes new investigations of climate change, migration, and their impacts on health and healthcare systems. Her work in this area aims to examine how environmental changes affect population health outcomes and healthcare delivery. She has previously studied the health effects of unconventional natural gas development (“fracking”) in the Marcellus Shale region and separately, assessed the quality of publicly reported data on fracture fluids.
Dr. Sanghavi has been awarded multiple research grants from agencies including the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), with findings published in leading medical and health policy journals including JAMA Internal Medicine, Annals of Internal Medicine, The Lancet Planetary Health, and Health Services Research.
Dr. Sanghavi received her Ph.D. in Health Policy (Evaluative Science and Statistics) from Harvard University and her B.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Cornell University.