Sara Bachman

Sara S. (Sally) Bachman, Ph.D. holds a joint appointment on the faculty at Boston University’s Schools of Social Work and Public Health, and she serves as the Director of the Interdisciplinary Ph.D. Program in Sociology and Social Work at Boston University. She has twenty years’ experience with health policy research and program evaluation, focusing particularly on state and national health care coverage models and financing of health care for children with special health care needs and adults with complex health conditions including HIV/AIDS, disability and substance use. She has conducted numerous research, policy analysis and evaluation efforts related to these topics and has published extensively on the results of these projects.

Dr. Bachman is currently the Principal Investigator for the Catalyst Center, which is one of six national centers funded by the Maternal and Child Health Bureau to promote expanding health care coverage for children with special health care needs and their families. In this capacity, she has worked to design and complete technical assistance, policy analysis and research on health care coverage and financing issues for this vulnerable population. In particular, they have created a chartbook of indicators about state and national trends in financing and reimbursement for children with special health care needs.

Dr. Bachman has also served as Co-Principal Investigator of a federally funded evaluation and support center for 15 national sites providing oral health care services for people with HIV/AIDS. She has conducted numerous studies with the Commonwealth of Massachusetts regarding health care coverage and financing of care including studies of Massachusetts’s health reform initiative. Dr. Bachman received her Ph.D. from Brandeis University’s Heller School where she was a Pew Health Policy Scholar.