Dr. Donohue is Professor and Chair in the Department of Health Policy and Management in the School of Public Health. She was the inaugural director of the Medicaid Research Center in Pitt’s Health Policy Institute and currently serves as a senior advisor to the Center. She is a faculty affiliate with the Center for Pharmaceutical Policy and Prescribing (CP3). Donohue is an associate editor at JAMA Health Forum, the leading health policy journal in the US. She earned a PhD in health policy from Harvard University and completed a post-doctoral fellowship in pharmaceutical policy research at Harvard Medical School.
Donohue conducts research on insurance coverage, financing, and delivery of health care with a focus on use of prescription drugs and behavioral health services. She has studied the impact of policy changes on access, quality and costs in Medicare, Medicaid and commercial insurance. Her research has been published in leading journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, JAMA Health Forum, JAMA Psychiatry, JAMA Internal Medicine and Health Affairs. A majority of her current research focuses on improving quality, access, and equity for Medicaid enrollees, in general, and for individuals with substance use, in particular. In collaboration with AcademyHealth, in 2017, she launched the Medicaid Outcomes Distributed Research Network (MODRN) to support multi-state Medicaid policy research. Donohue has also conducted research on the impact of the Affordable Care Act, Medicare Part D, and on the organizational, industry and policy influences on prescribing behavior. Donohue’s research group has a long track record of federal grant funding including from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the National Institute of Mental Health, and the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute.
