For his work redefining health care policy and delivery for America’s low-income populations, Chima Ndumele MPH, Ph.D.’13, associate professor of health policy at the Yale School of Public Health, is the recipient of the Brown University School of Public Health’s 2024 Alumni Impact Award. A distinguished alumnus of Brown’s doctoral program in health services research, Ndumele’s insights into health insurance and health care systems have positioned him as a leading figure in the field, influencing state and federal policy and working to streamline the administration of safety-net programs.
Ndumele’s research focuses on the organization and delivery of services under Medicaid, health insurer for over 90 million Americans, and the extended social safety net. Amid concerns that the federal expansion of Medicaid would increase demand for services without a parallel increase in the number of physicians, Ndumele was the first researcher to calculate that expansion was unlikely to compromise access or reroute care to emergency rooms.
His contributions include groundbreaking studies examining “ghost providers” in Medicaid networks (which claim to take Medicaid coverage but deliver little to no care to recipients); the relationship between social services availability and utilization and health outcomes; and inefficiencies and persistent disparities within the U.S. health care system. Recognized as an Emerging Scholar by the National Academies of Medicine in 2023, he has been cited over 2500 times in peer-reviewed literature.
Currently, Ndumele is leading a multi-state initiative aimed at designing a smarter, more integrated safety-net for low-income households, while also embedding a data science team from Yale within the Connecticut Department of Social Services to cultivate evidence-based policy improvements.
We spoke with Professor Ndumele about his contributions, his ongoing projects and how the mentorship he received at Brown expanded his approach to building a more equitable and efficient health care system.
You’ve achieved remarkable success early in your career, particularly in health policy research related to low-income Americans. What initially drew you to this area of study?
The inequity in health outcomes among low-income Americans resonated with me deeply. Growing up in East Orange, New Jersey, it was common to see preventable health challenges severely impacting lives, and that felt wrong on a personal level.
As a child, I lived next door to an elderly woman who would routinely say, “If something happens to me, make sure they take me to Mountainside Hospital.” But Mountainside was four towns and six hospitals away. She viscerally and intuitively understood that the care she would get in her community wasn’t the best. I wanted to figure out why that was the case and what I could do to help solve that challenge.