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Dr. Frances Lynch is a senior investigator at OCHIN. She is a health economist whose research focuses on the organization and financing of care for people with mental health conditions. Her work has particularly focused on mental health and developmental conditions in children and the economic impact of these conditions on families. She has extensive experience conducting economic evaluations of complex behavioral interventions, including interventions for depression and anxiety disorders. She has also worked on studies investigating risk factors for suicide and interventions to prevent suicide.
Frances has been the principal investigator or co-investigator on more than 20 grants from the National Institutes of Health. She has also conducted methodological research on quality of life in mental health conditions and methods for economic evaluation of interventions for mental health disorders.
In addition to her work at OCHIN, Frances holds an appointment as a distinguished investigator at the Center for Health Research at Kaiser Permanente Northwest.
Frances received her PhD in health economics from the Johns Hopkins University School of Hygiene and Public Health, where she was the recipient of a fellowship in health economics from the National Institute of Mental Health. Following her doctoral work, Frances was a post-doctoral fellow in children’s mental health in the Department of Mental Health at Johns Hopkins University. She also holds a Master of Science degree in public health policy from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an undergraduate degree from the University of California, Berkeley.
Much of Frances’ work has focused on interventions for children and youth with mental health conditions. She has designed and conducted studies of children’s mental health within both private and public health care systems. She has also conducted methodological research on the measurement of health service use for children, and on understanding how children’s mental health conditions impact the family. For the last 18 years, Frances has been conducting economic evaluations of complex behavioral interventions, including cognitive behavioral interventions, web-based mental health programs, early intervention programs, and mental health treatment programs. In the course of this work, she has conducted one of the first economic evaluations of a depression prevention program. She has refined statistical methods of analyzing clinical outcomes for depression in the context of economic evaluation, and she has participated in qualitative research to help to make economic evaluation more relevant to health system and public health policy decision-makers. In addition, she has worked on methodologic research related to economic evaluation, including studies on quality of life measurement in adults and youth with mental health problems and improving data collection of health service use data in multi-site studies.
Children’s mental health services research
Economic evaluation of behavioral interventions
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