Expertise:
- Health Economics
- Real-world Evidence
- Responsible AI Evaluation
- Decision Science
- Health Equity
For advisory work, speaking, or research collaborations:
khors@uw.edu
Sara Khor is a health economist and applied health policy researcher who helps healthcare organizations, digital health companies, employers, and research teams evaluate health technologies, AI-enabled tools, mental health interventions, and care delivery models. Her work focuses on real-world outcomes, equity, value, and the design of rigorous evaluation frameworks to support responsible healthcare decision-making.
How I Help Organizations
Sara works with organizations that need rigorous, decision-ready evidence about healthcare technologies, AI-enabled tools, mental health interventions, and care delivery models.
Her consulting work supports:
- Evaluation strategy
- Real-world evidence generation
- Health economic analysis
- Equity-centered value assessment
- Decision modeling
- Responsible AI evaluation.
Across this work, Sara helps organizations answer practical questions: What works? For whom? At what cost? How should value be assessed? What are the implications for access, equity, implementation, and long-term impact?
Experience & Current Roles
Sara brings 15 years of experience across academia, healthcare, and public-sector research. Her expertise spans health economics, outcomes research, causal inference, machine learning, and decision modeling, with a consistent focus on generating evidence that is both methodologically strong and useful for real-world decision-making.
She is currently a Research Scientist at Spring Health and an Affiliate Assistant Professor at the CHOICE Institute at the University of Washington. At Spring Health, she evaluates how AI-enabled tools and mental health care models perform in practice and how their value should be assessed across outcomes, access, equity, and implementation. Her work is particularly focused on designing frameworks for evaluating AI in mental health and helping decision-makers think more clearly about tradeoffs between effectiveness, burden, disparities, and long-term impact.
Before Spring Health, Sara held research roles at Stanford Health Policy, UW Medicine, and Cancer Care Ontario, where she worked on healthcare algorithms, program evaluation, patient-centered outcomes, and health policy questions across diverse care settings. These experiences continue to inform her approach to evaluating healthcare technologies and delivery innovations in ways that are both rigorous and practically relevant.
Research, Publications & Recognition
Sara’s work is especially centered on populations that are often overlooked in traditional evaluation frameworks. She helps health systems, employers, and innovators make better decisions about care delivery and technology adoption by using evaluation approaches that account for disparities, financial toxicity, and the broader social consequences of intervention design.
Her work has been published in leading peer-reviewed journals, including JAMA Surgery, JAMA Network Open, Value in Health, Journal of Clinical Oncology, and Journal of General Internal Medicine, and has been featured in STAT News, the National Cancer Institute, Medscape, and Healio.
Sara earned her PhD in Health Economics and Outcomes Research from the CHOICE Institute at the University of Washington and holds a Master’s degree in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Toronto. Her honors include the Bruce Schackman Award for Outstanding Presentation in Health Services, Outcomes, and Policy Research at the 2024 Society of Medical Decision Making Annual Meeting, as well as awards and fellowships from the PhRMA Foundation, AFPE, ASCO, and the University of Washington.
In addition to her research, Sara contributes to the field through teaching, mentoring, and editorial service. She teaches classes on distributional cost-effectiveness analysis and algorithmic bias at the University of Washington and serves on the Board of Editors for Medical Decision Making.
Sara Khor 