Christal Ramos

Christal Ramos is an expert in health policy and mixed methods research. She has over 20 years of experience implementing and evaluating federal policies affecting health care delivery. An experienced project director, Dr. Ramos has led implementation evaluation and technical assistance contracts and tasks for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT, the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, and foundations.

Dr. Ramos is currently the implementation evaluation and primary data collection lead for the CMS Increasing Organ Transplant Access (IOTA) Evaluation. She served as the deputy project director for the GSA National Evaluation of the American Rescue Plan, a mixed-methods implementation evaluation that required coordination across 11 federal agencies implementing 32 ARP-funded programs. She also led studies on Medicaid and hospital payment policy, including for the Medicaid and CHIP Payment and Access Commission (MACPAC).

In her previous position at the Urban Institute, Dr. Ramos led implementation evaluation tasks for multiple CMS programs, including for Iowa and Texas State Innovation Models (SIM) Initiatives, Indiana and Montana Medicaid 1115 waiver demonstrations, the Children's Health Insurance Program Reauthorization Act (CHIPRA) Quality Demonstrations, and the American Recovery & Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) Health Information Technology for Economic Clinical Health (HITECH) Act. She also led a team of five firms as the project director for a long-running contract to provide technical assistance, training, and program analysis support to CMS and state Medicaid agencies in the implementation, monitoring, and oversight of the HITECH and SUPPORT Acts.

Dr. Ramos also worked at the George Washington University Center for Health Care Quality, where she was part of the National Program Office for several Robert Wood Johnson Foundation initiatives. Before that, she was responsible for the American Academy of Physician Assistants annual survey and other data that contributed to federal workforce datasets and health care provider shortage designations.