Cheryl L. Damberg

Cheryl Damberg is the Distinguished Chair in Health Care Payment Policy and a principal senior researcher at the RAND Corporation. Her research explores the impact of strategies to drive cost and quality improvements in health care and how providers are redesigning health care delivery in response to new payment models and increased accountability.

As a national leader in value-based purchasing and application of performance measures, she has examined the effects of payment reforms, identified strategies to minimize unintended consequences associated with value-based payment, and worked to apply social risk factor adjustments to improve the validity of measures to compare provider performance. Damberg testified before Congress regarding how to include pay for performance into revisions to Medicare physician payments which informed the development of MACRA.

She is director of RAND’s Center of Excellence on Health System Performance which characterizes and studies health systems and identifies the attributes of health systems associated with high performance. She leads a team working with the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services to generate Medicare Advantage Star Ratings. She previously served as director of research for the Pacific Business Group on Health, where she led early efforts to measure provider quality and report comparative performance results to consumers, a senior consultant to Fortune 100 firms for the MEDSTAT Group, and a research fellow in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. She holds a Ph.D. in public policy from the Pardee RAND Graduate School and an M.P.H from the University of Michigan. July 2020