Dr. Leyla Tosun is a Senior Research Consultant and Principal Investigator in the Health & Social Sciences research section at the Ohio Colleges of Medicine Government Resource Center. Her primary responsibilities include leadership of complex research projects and contributions to technical activities in survey research and administrative data analyses. She manages large and multidisciplinary teams, overseeing budges, contracts, and staffing. She also works on technical tasks, including in research design and methods, measure development, statistical analyses, survey instrumentation, writing and editing technical reports, and presenting research findings to stakeholders. Her areas of expertise include survey design and methodology, Medicaid administrative data, health policy evaluations, causal inference with observational data, study design, inferential statistics, and mixed-methods research strategies. Her research interests are in substance use disorder treatment and behavioral health, population health, and access to care.
Since 2022 she has led the Ohio Medicaid Assessment Survey, which is the state’s largest probability sample population health survey of all non-institutionalized Ohioans, sponsored by the Ohio Department of Medicaid. She leads a large team of internal and academic contributors, liaising with 5 state agencies, heading survey instrumentation and documentation, overseeing subcontracted survey administration, advising on methodology and analyses, and developing findings reports. She also leads an evaluation of Ohio Medicaid’s Substance Use Disorder Section 1115 Demonstration Waiver, which uses multidimensional measures developed out of Medicaid administrative data for use in interrupted time series models to assess the causal impact of Ohio’s waiver on substance use disorder treatment, health outcomes, and overdose deaths.
Previously, she led a mixed-methods pre/post evaluation of Ohio Medicaid’s change in reimbursement rate for home health services, as well as the Ohio COVID-19 Survey and the Medicaid COVID-19 Survey for the Ohio Department of Health and the Ohio Department of Medicaid. In previous roles at GRC, Leyla has served as a statistical analyst, consultant, and survey methods expert for program evaluations and needs assessments, including for an evaluation of Ohio Medicaid’s OhioRISE youth behavioral health program. Prior to her work at GRC, she was a doctoral researcher and taught university-level courses during her graduate training.
Dr. Tosun holds a B.A. in Political Science and Economics from the University of Virginia and a Ph.D. in Political Science from The Ohio State University.