Liana Rosenkrantz Woskie
Postdoctoral Fellow in International and Public Affairs
Liana Woskie is a Watson Fellow jointly appointed through the School of Public Health’s Department of Health Services, Policy and Practice. She works closely with Harvard University’s program on health systems and, before joining Brown, served as the Assistant Director of the Harvard Initiative on Global Health Quality. Her PhD in Health Policy and Economics is at the London School of Economics (LSE), where her dissertation project: “Quantifying Structural Violence: Female Sterilization and Normalized State Repression in Healthcare,” was recently awarded the Guggenheim Emerging Scholar prize. In 2018 her research on health financing (with Papanicolas & Jha) examined U.S. health spending from an international perspective and was named Top Article of the Decade by the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA)’s editor in chief; also covered by the New York Times Magazine, Forbes and the Washington Post. Prior to studying health system performance measurement, she coordinated the Lancet Independent Panel on the Global Governance Response to Ebola (2015-16). Recent non-doctoral projects build on this experience, examining curtailed population mobility and human rights during COVID-19.
Liana’s research focuses on the conceptual and practical challenges of holding health systems accountable to patients, with an emphasis on quantifying contemporary structural drivers of coercion. She has experience conducting research on, and leading large-scale projects in, India, Liberia, China, Afghanistan and the US. Her dissertation provides the first quantification of a World Health Organization (WHO) human rights framework on involuntary female sterilization. Previously, she studied health financing across Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) nations and also worked with a team commissioned by the National Academy of Science and Medicine (NASEM) to calculate human harm resulting from unsafe and otherwise poor quality healthcare services. Her work has been published in the Lancet, the British Medical Journal (BMJ) and the Journal of Feminist Economics, among others with funding from multiple foundations, including: Gates, Rockefeller and Guggenheim.
Current projects build on the fields of health services research and development economics, spanning the following areas:
1.) The prevalence and structural drivers of uninformed female sterilizations in populations at heightened risk of receiving coercive care.
2.) Use of quasi-experimental methods to examine policies and seminal political events (e.g. supreme court decisions) that may directly or indirectly impact sterilization practice patterns.
3.) Cross-national performance assessment - how countries differ in the delivery and financing of care and how this, in turn, impacts clinical outcomes and health spending.
4.) Methodological issues in health system performance measurement and accounting (e.g. discordance between the subjective and objective measurement of patient-centeredness).
Journal:
Woskie L, Hennessy J, Espinosa V, et al. Early Social Distancing Policies in Europe, Changes in Mobility & COVID-19 Case Trajectories: Insights from Spring 2020. PLoS ONE. 2021; 16(6):e0253071.
Woskie L, Wenham C. Do Men and Women Lockdown Differently? An Assessment of Panama’s COVID-19 Sex-Segregated Social Distancing Policy. Feminist Economics. 2021; 27(1-2): 327-344.
Woskie L, Tsai T, Wellenius G, Jha A. Early Impact of India’s Nationwide Lockdown on Aggregate Population Mobility and COVID-19 Cases. The Lancet SSRN. 2020; DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.3631258.
Woskie L, Fallah M. Overcoming Distrust in Health Systems to Deliver Universal Health Coverage: the Case of Ebola in Liberia. The British Medical Journal (BMJ). 2019; 366: I5482.
Papanicolas I, Woskie L, Jha A. Health Care Spending in the United States and Other High-Income Countries. Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). 2018; 319(10), 1024-1039.
Jishnu D, Woskie L, Rajbhandari R, Abbasi K, Jha A. Rethinking Assumptions about the Delivery of Healthcare: Implications for Universal Health Coverage. The BMJ. 2018; 361, k1716.
Moon S, Leigh J, Woskie L, Checchi F, Dzau V, Fallah M, Fitzgerald G, Garrett L, Gostin L, Heymann D, Katz R, Kickbusch I, Morrison S, Piot P, Sands P, Sridhar D, Jha A. Post-Ebola Reforms: Ample Analysis, Inadequate Action. The BMJ. 2017; 356, j280.
Book Chapters & Reports:
Woskie L. Chapter: How Do We Hold Health Systems Accountable to Patients? Conceptual and Practical Challenges in the Routine Measurement of Patient-Centeredness. Report: Health Systems Performance Assessment. Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, 2021.
Woskie L, Wenham C. Report: The United Kingdom’s Aid Response to COVID-19: A Rapid Review of Shifting Bi- and Multi-Lateral Financing Trends. Independent Commission for Aid Impact (ICAI), 2021.
Garcia E, Woskie L. Chapter: Exploring Lessons Learned Since the 1918 Influenza Pandemic. Report: Exploring Lessons Learned from a Century of Outbreaks, Readiness for 2030. The National Academies Press, 2019.
Papanicolas I, Woskie L et al. Chapter: The Current State of Global Health Care Quality. Report: Crossing the Global Quality Chasm, Improving Health Care Worldwide. The National Academies Press, 2018.
Woskie L, Leatherman S. Chapter: Understanding Levers to Improve Quality. Book: Delivering Quality Health Services, A Global Imperative for Universal Health Coverage. The World Health Organization (WHO), 2018.
Health Systems Assessment Short Course (Harvard School of Public Health & India Health Systems Collaborative)
Confronting Covid-19: Science, History & Policy (Harvard Faculty of Arts and Science)
Innovation and Global Health Systems (Harvard School of Public Health)
Lessons from Ebola: Preventing the Next Global Pandemic (edX)
Improving Global Healthcare: Focusing on Quality and Safety (edX)
Managing Health Information Technology (Harvard School of Public Health)
September 9, 2022
Watson Postdoctoral Fellow Liana Woskie named a 2022 Guggenheim Emerging Scholar for her dissertation project titled, "Quantifying Structural Violence: Female Sterilization and Normalized State Repression in Healthcare."