Holly Korda, Ph.D.

Holly Korda, Ph.D.
Deputy Director for Strategy and Growth, Altarum Institute

Dr. Holly Korda brings career experience as a consultant to nonprofit, public, and private organizations in the areas of performance-based evaluation and decision support, strategic analysis, and identification and transfer of best practice innovations in public- and private-sector health care. She has worked with agencies throughout the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) on health care and community systems development and evaluation, with private and nonprofit health care and insurance plans, and with administrative services organizations on program strategies and approaches to maximize health systems outcomes for public beneficiaries and special needs populations.

Korda is highly experienced with the range of qualitative and quantitative evaluation methodologies used in health services, systems, and policy research. She has worked extensively with administrative and claims data for performance monitoring and improvement, market assessment, and multisite interventions in health care delivery and social marketing contexts. From 1997 to 2003, Korda served as Chair of the DHHS agency-wide Evaluation Quality Review Panel for the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, DHHS. She has provided training and technical assistance in evaluation methods to university and field-based grantees of the federal Health Resources and Services Administration since 2000 and serves on numerous review panels for federal health care delivery programs and professional journals.

A principal focus of Korda’s work is the design and evaluation of health care systems, with a focus on administrative and program innovations to improve consumer access and provider and plan viability in diverse health care markets. She has designed basic approaches to monitor and track health system impacts and has developed performance improvement models to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of care delivery. Many of her engagements have involved working across the public and private sectors on program innovations to improve systems of care across multiple provider types to increase appropriate utilization of services and health outcomes. Korda has conducted strategic assessments of business and care delivery models for private clients and analyses to integrate evidence-based practices to improve health care quality, access, and cost-effectiveness.

Korda serves as the deputy director for strategy and growth for Altarum’s Systems Research and Initiatives group, responsibile for of SRI’s long-range planning and business development efforts. Her previous positions include consulting principal of Health Systems Research Associates, associate dean for community programs at the University of New England, senior vice president and manager of the Health Systems Group at ROW Sciences, project director and senior analyst in the Health Research Area of Abt Associates, and director for policy research at Massachusetts Medicaid.

Holly Korda, Ph.D.'s Posts

Value-Based Health Care: The Issues

Addressing three dilemmas: Who defines value and how? How can value be measured? Can a value-based system also respect choice?

Bundled Payment, Transparency, and Market Competition: What’s Under Wraps?

Bundling provides incentives for providers to differentiate product and price and enables purchasers and payers to compare and contrast offerings.

Where’s the Patient in the Patient-Centered Medical Home?

PCMH models are new, diverse, dynamic, and evolving. We need to understand them, work with them, and design them from blueprints that meet patients’ needs.

Quality, Cost and ACOs: What Have We Learned from HMOs?

National health reform legislation gave birth to accountable care organizations, which were touted as a model to promote quality and reduce costs of health care delivery, but are they “HMOs on steroids”?