About

Email: sakhor@gmail.com

Sara Khor is a health economist and applied health policy researcher specializing in the evaluation of AI technologies, mental health interventions, and care delivery models. Her work focuses on real-world outcomes, equity, value, and the design of frameworks to support responsible healthcare decision-making.

She is currently a Research Scientist at Spring Health, where she evaluates how AI-enabled tools and mental health care models perform in practice and how their value should be assessed across outcomes, access, equity, and implementation. Her work is particularly focused on designing frameworks for evaluating AI in mental health and helping decision-makers think more clearly about tradeoffs between effectiveness, burden, disparities, and long-term impact.

Sara brings 15 years of experience across academia, healthcare, and public-sector research. Her expertise spans health economics, outcomes research, causal inference, machine learning, and decision modeling, with a consistent focus on generating evidence that is both rigorous and useful for real-world decision-making.

Before Spring Health, Sara held research roles at Stanford Health Policy, UW Medicine, and Cancer Care Ontario, where she worked on healthcare algorithms, program evaluation, patient-centered outcomes, and health policy questions across diverse care settings. These experiences continue to inform her approach to evaluating healthcare technologies and delivery innovations in ways that are both methodologically strong and practically relevant.

Sara’s research is especially centered on populations that are often overlooked in traditional evaluation frameworks. She is interested in how health systems, employers, and innovators can make better decisions about care delivery and technology adoption by using evaluation approaches that account for disparities, financial toxicity, and the broader social consequences of intervention design.

Her work has been published in leading peer-reviewed journals, including JAMA Surgery, JAMA Network Open, Value in Health, Journal of Clinical Oncology, and Journal of General Internal Medicine, and has been featured in STAT News, the National Cancer Institute, Medscape, and Healio.

Sara earned her PhD in Health Economics and Outcomes Research from the CHOICE Institute at the University of Washington and holds a Master’s degree in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Toronto. Her honors include the Bruce Schackman Award for Outstanding Presentation in Health Services, Outcomes, and Policy Research at the 2024 Society of Medical Decision Making Annual Meeting, as well as awards and fellowships from the PhRMA Foundation, AFPE, ASCO, and the University of Washington.

In addition to her research, Sara contributes to the field through teaching and editorial service. She teaches classes on distributional cost-effectiveness analysis and algorithmic bias at the University of Washington and serves on the Board of Editors for Medical Decision Making.