About

Expertise:

• HEOR strategy and evidence roadmaps
• Real-world evidence and causal inference
• Economic evaluation and decision modeling
• Responsible AI and algorithm evaluation
• Patient-reported outcomes
• Health equity and distributional analysis

For advisory work, speaking, or research collaborations:

khors@uw.edu

Sara Khor is a health economist and HEOR strategy leader with more than 15 years of experience generating real-world, economic, and patient-reported ouctome evidence. She helps healthcare organizations, digital health companies, employers, and research teams determine what evidence they need, how to generate it, and how to translate it into product, pricing, care-delivery, and policy decisions.

Her work spans cancer technologies, AI-enabled tools, mental health interventions, clinical registries, and healthcare delivery programs. She specializes in evidence roadmaps, causal inference, comparative effectiveness, economic evaluation, patient-reported outcomes, decision modeling, and health equity.

How Sara Help Organizations

Sara advises organizations that need evidence to guide technology development, care delivery, pricing, or policy. Her work includes:

• Developing HEOR strategies and evidence roadmaps
• Identifying evidence gaps and prioritizing research
• Sequencing studies around product and organizational decisions
• Designing real-world evidence and patient-reported outcome studies
• Building economic and decision models
• Evaluating AI-enabled tools and clinical algorithms
• Assessing value, access, equity, and implementation
• Translating results into internal recommendations, white papers, and external evidence communications

Her work helps organizations answer practical questions: What works, for whom, and under what conditions? What outcomes should be measured? What is a good outcome worth? How should clinical, economic, access, and equity trade-offs influence a decision?

Experience & Current Roles

She is currently a Research Scientist at Spring Health and an Affiliate Assistant Professor at the CHOICE Institute at the University of Washington. At Spring Health, she contributes to the HEOR evidence roadmap by identifying evidence gaps, strengthening evaluation plans, and prioritizing and sequencing studies aligned with enterprise-level value objectives. She evaluates how AI-enabled tools and mental health care models perform in practice and helps define how value should be measured across clinical outcomes, cost, access, equity, and implementation.

Alongside her primary role, Sara provides research methods consulting to research organizations and pharmaceutical and medical-device companies. She advises on evidence strategy, clinical studies, registries, and patient-reported outcomes; develops protocols and analysis plans; selects endpoints; aligns studies with FDA requirements; directs analysts; and helps teams interpret real-world data.

Sara previously held research roles at Stanford Health Policy, UW Medicine, and Cancer Care Ontario. Her work included evaluating clinical algorithms, healthcare delivery programs, patient-reported outcomes, and cancer technologies using real-world data, causal inference, and economic modeling.

Research & Recognition

Sara’s research is especially centered on populations that are often overlooked in traditional evaluation frameworks. She helps health systems, employers, and innovators 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 UroToday, 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, 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, mentoring, and editorial service. She teaches graduate methods in distributional cost-effectiveness analysis and algorithmic bias at the University of Washington and serves on the Board of Editors for Medical Decision Making.