About Us

Mark S. Litwin, MD, MPH, Principal Investigator. Dr. Litwin is the Chair of UCLA's Department of Urology, as well as a board-certified academic urologist, former Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar, and fellowship-trained in health services research methods, who holds a joint faculty appointment in urology and health services research. He has conducted a wide variety of epidemiologic, economic, and health services research studies with large and small datasets that span the scope of urology. These have addressed resource utilization, costs, medical outcomes, practice patterns, quality of life and quality of care in prostate, bladder, and kidney cancer, BPH, urinary tract infections, chronic prostatitis, as well as a catalog of the most common procedures performed by urologists in the United States.

Christopher S. Saigal, MD, MPH, Co-Principal Investigator and Principal Investigator for the RAND sub-contract. Dr. Saigal is a board-certified academic urologist and former American Foundation for Urologic Diseases (AFUD) Scholar. His research interests include quality of care, quality of life outcomes, medical decision-making, and the use of information technology to improve the health care system. His interest in the use of administrative data to inform public policy has led to the publication of several manuscripts in highly regarded journals. His research productivity was recognized by UCLA's Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center (JCCC) with a Kane Scholar Award for Research. His strong performance as Principal Investigator the UDA sub-contract at RAND was recognized with an award of distinction from RAND. The AUA recognized Dr. Saigal by naming him the Lattimer lecturer at the 2005 AUA annual meeting.

Sarah Connor, Project Manager. In addition to coordinating the UDA project, is part of a research core that coordinates and assists with many research projects at the UCLA Department of Urology.

The RAND Team
Claude Messan Setodji, PhD, is a statistician at RAND with interest in applications of statistics to public policy, causal inferences, data reduction and visualization. Dr. Setodji was part of the RAND research team that developed the model framework and statistical tools to capture persistent teacher effects in light of changing classroom contexts that result when students move on to other teachers. He also has interest in Health policy research and was part of a RAND-CDC team that evaluates the influence of immunization rates on the likelihood of influenza-like illness clusters in nursing facilities. Dr. Setodji also has extensive experience in quality of health care assessment and he co-authored the article "Who is at greatest risk for receiving poor-quality health care?", for the New England Journal of Medicine, that has important policy implications on how health care is delivered in the US.

Andrew W. Dick, PhD, is a Senior Economist at RAND. Before joining RAND, Dr. Dick was an assistant professor in the Department of Community and Preventive Medicine at the University of Rochester where he maintains an adjunct faculty position. While at the University of Rochester, he was the director and principal investigator of the Pre and Post-Doctoral NRSA Training grant. He has been involved in the development of methods and empirical applications of risk-adjustment models for quality assessment, comparative effectiveness research, and cost estimation, all with a focus on applied econometric methods for drawing causal inference. He has led or been involved in many studies about access to, quality of, and costs of care using large secondary data sources, such as Medicare claims, hospital administrative data, and private insurance claims data. In addition to leading economic analysis on the UDA project, he is now the Co-Director of the RAND University of Pittsburgh NRSA Post-Doctoral Training grant.

Jan Hanley, MS, is the director of the RAND Research Programming Group and a Senior Programmer. Beginning with her work on the RAND Health Insurance Experiment, Ms. Hanley has twenty-seven years experience with large-scale data management for health research projects. Most recently Ms. Hanley was one of the lead programmers for the Urologic Diseases in America (UDA) project, on which she worked extensively with SEER/Medicare data and CMS claims file and was a key contributor to the analysis plans involved both data sets.

Rodger Madison, MA, is a senior programmer with over 20 years experience working with administrative databases including CMS claims files, California welfare claims record, as well as claims files from a number of HMOs. He has supported projects ranging from high-level descriptive surveys (Urologic Diseases in America) to quality of care assessment focused at an individual level. Mr. Madison is also a member of the RAND Institutional Review Board (IRB) on which he has primary responsibility for data security and privacy issues such as secure storage and transmission of data and encryption technology.

Julie C. Lai, MPH, is a research programmer/analyst at RAND Corporation. She holds a master of public health with emphasis in biostatistics and epidemiology as well as a bachelor's degree in biology. At RAND, she works primarily in areas of health. Ms. Lai is a programmer skilled in data cleaning, data management, data regression and analysis, and variable construction. She works extensively in software packages such as SAS, ArcGIS, STATA, SPSS, Microsoft Access, and Microsoft Office.

Alexandria Smith, MPH, is a research programmer at RAND corporations. She holds a bachelors degree in international relations and sociology as well as a masters of public health in health policy and management from Emory University. She has experience in management of large claims dataset and analysis, and has worked with a range of programming tools including SAS, STATA and SPSS. She is familiar with a variety of datasets including Medicare data, private insurance files, Area Resource File (ARF), HCUP (Health Care Cost and Utilization Project), KID (Kids Inpatient Database), NAMCS (National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey), NHAMCS (National Hospital Ambulatory Medical Care Survey), and census files.

Elizabeth M. Yano, PhD, MSPH, has trained in health care epidemiology, biostatistics and health policy at UCLA and RAND Health. Dr. Yano has 25 years' experience in health services research and program evaluation. She is Deputy Director and Senior Scientist at the VA Greater Los Angeles HSR&D Center of Excellence for the Study of Healthcare Provider Behavior and Adjunct Associate Professor of Health Services at the UCLA School of Public Health.

Tiffany Hruby, BFA, is a Level IV administrative assistant at the RAND Corporation. Tiffany provides support on a breadth of projects and programs for health research. Her career includes 10 years supporting C-level executives. She recently joined the UDA team and will coordinate RAND project work.