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Todd Gilmer, Ph.D., is a Professor in the Herbert Wertheim School of Public Health and Human Longevity Science at the University of California, San Diego. He received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Washington in 1997. His research has focused on three areas: health insurance/risk adjustment, cost-effectiveness of diabetes care, and mental health services. Dr. Gilmer specializes in research design and data analysis, the use of large data sets including those from Medicare, Medicaid, and commercial health plans, national surveys and census data, and mixed data sets that combine epidemiological data with health insurance claims, and the evaluation of community based interventions to improve chronic disease care to low-income populations.

Dr. Gilmer has published papers examining the determinants and the decline of health insurance coverage, states efforts’ to improve coverage, crowd-out of private insurance, and generosity of Medicaid programs. His ongoing research describes the “Faces of Medicaid,” or the number and types of Medicaid beneficiaries, their disease burden, and utilization of services; ethnic disparities in disease burden and services use in Medicaid; and variation in technological diffusion across state Medicaid programs. Dr Gilmer has also developed or co-developed diagnostic and pharmacy based models to adjust health insurance premium payments to health plans enrolling Medicaid and Medicare enrollees, and is active is assisting state Medicaid programs with implementation of these models.

In the area of diabetes research, Dr. Gilmer has analyzed the costs to health plans of patients with poor glycemic control, associations between office systems, costs, and outcomes, and the outcomes, costs, and cost effectiveness of delivery system redesigns to improve the quality of diabetes care including electronic medical record based clinical decision support and Project Dulce, a culturally specific diabetes management and self-management training program designed for low-income and primarily Spanish-speaking Latinos. Dr. Gilmer has developed, implemented, and is evaluated a combined diabetes and depression care management program, Project Dulce + IMPACT, in community health centers in San Diego County.

In the area of mental health services, Dr. Gilmer has examined quality of care and costs
related to the organization and financing of services; the effect of adherence to antipsychotic medications and atypical antipsychotic polypharmacy on mental health services use, costs, and outcomes among persons with schizophrenia; disparities in services use by race/ethnicity and limited English proficiency; and the cost-effectiveness of supported housing program for homeless adults with serious mental illness. Dr. Gilmer leads teams of health services researchers based in the Health Services Research Center to provide data analysis and performance monitoring for San Diego County Behavioral Health Services and Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health.