RTI International
Discovery and Analytical Sciences
3040 Cornwallis Road
PO Box 12194
Research Triangle Park
NCUSA
27709
Biographical Sketch: Dr. Lee Mobley is a Senior Fellow in Health Economics at RTI, with a Ph.D. in health economics. Her work focuses on analysis of health care markets, women’s health, health disparities, health and place, health care utilization and outcomes, behavioral health, multilevel modeling, spatial modeling, spatial econometrics, use of geographic information systems (GIS) in medical cartography, geo-spatial database development, and socio-ecological modeling. She joined RTI in July 2001 and her work has included a geographic analysis of HIV/AIDS prevention services, development of relational databases and market analysis for several Medicare Modernization reform initiatives, analysis of spatial clustering in behavioral risk factors associated with coronary heart disease in low-income women, spatial clustering and regression analysis of access to preventive care services by the elderly, analysis of reasons why the elderly disenroll from their Medicare health maintenance organizations (HMOs), analysis of why insurance firms joined the Medicare preferred provider organization (PPO) demonstration, and analysis of how urban sprawl impacts obesity and cardiac risk in low-income women. Dr. Mobley has developed an extensive geo-spatial database and used it to conduct analysis of the many reasons why men and women don’t get regular breast or colorectal cancer screening. Contextual and compositional factors in the community are strong predictors of cancer screening behavior in multilevel models including person-level and community-level factors. The database is now available for public use via a website built by RTI International: http://rtispatialdata.rti.org/. Online tools for mapping and smoothing the data are available at the project’s sister website: http://geodacenter.asu.edu/geodata
Dr. Mobley’s areas of continued research interest include spatially-enabled analysis of socio-ecological problems where place and space are important. These interests include: topics in healthcare, criminology, and antitrust; behavioral modeling; health risk or outcomes simulation and prediction; resource-targeting analysis; gap or suitability analysis; studies of diffusion or contagion; and building spatial decision support systems combining databases, knowledge bases, and tools.