The Heller School Faculty and Staff

Research Associate

yara@brandeis.edu Heller 273 781-736-3831

Expertise

Costing and cost-effectiveness research, willingness to pay, burden of disease, health financing, health equity and National Health Accounts

Scholarship

  • Halasa Y., Nassar H. and Zaky H. Benefit Incidence Analysis of the Government Spending on Ministry of Health Outpatient Services in Jordan. Eastern Mediterranean Health Journal, 2010, 16(5): 259-265.

  • Halasa Y. and Nandakumar A.K. Factors Determining Choice of Healthcare Providers in Jordan. Eastern Mediterranean Health Journal, 2009, 15(4): 959-968.
  • Halasa, Y. 2008. Mapping Health Care Financing in Jordan, Cairo, Egypt: The Regional Office of the Eastern Mediterranean/WHO.

  • Banks D. and Halasa Y. August 2005. Patient Satisfaction and Pain Management in Ministry of Health Hospitals in Jordan, Bethesda, MD: The Partners for Health Reformplus Project, Abt Associates Inc. http://www.healthsystems2020.org/content/resource/detail/1635/.
Yara Halasa

Profile

Yara Halasa, DDS, MS, has been working in health policy and economic analyses of health and health-related projects both in the United States and internationally for the last decade. Her career began as a dentist at the Ministry of Health in Jordan. In 2002 she obtained her first Master’s degree from Bocconi University in Italy, and worked in Yemen in evaluating cost recovery schemes. In 2004, she was a research associate at the Planning Directorate at the Ministry of Health, and later she moved to the Health Insurance Directorate where she worked on insurance policy research, with a focus on equity analysis and government’s efficiency in the use of scarce resources. Additionally, she worked as a research associate with Partners for Health Reform Plus, a USAID-funded program, where she focused on issues related to decentralization and health organization accreditation. In 2005, she obtained a Master's of Science in International Health Policy and Management at the Heller School, Brandeis University. She worked as a consultant for the League of Arab States, and the Regional Office of the Eastern Mediterranean of the World Health Organization where she focused her research on equity and financing of health care services in Yemen and Jordan. Since 2007, she has been working at the Schneider Institutes for Health Policy with a focus on economic cost and cost-effectiveness analysis of health-related projects. She is the co-investigator for several projects, such as the economic evaluation of an area-wide integrated pest management program in New Jersey where she helped in implementing a willingness to pay and quality of life survey in addition to a household attitude and behavior survey as well as the cost component of that project; the impact and value of Joint Commission International's hospital accreditation program; the cost of dengue in Puerto Rico; and the global burden of Dengue with the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation. She is currently working on her PhD in Health Policy at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management.

Degrees

Brandeis University
M.S.

Bocconi University
M.S.

Aleppo University
D.D.S.