Laura Barrie Smith is a senior research associate in the Health Policy Division at the Urban Institute. She uses quantitative methods to examine how health care policies shape access to care, service use, and health outcomes. She specializes in working with large datasets, including medical claims, administrative data, and electronic health records.

Much of Smith’s current research focuses on Medicaid-covered populations, including pregnant and postpartum enrollees, children, and people dually enrolled in Medicare and Medicaid. Her recent and ongoing projects include evaluating the potential impacts of postpartum coverage extensions and other Medicaid eligibility policy changes using Medicaid claims data, analyzing drivers of state-level variation in Medicaid spending, estimating the effects of integrated care models for dual enrollees, contributing to the impact evaluation of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ Transforming Maternal Health (TMaH) Model, and examining access to reproductive health care in the post-Dobbs landscape. Her research has been published in academic journals including Medical Care Research and Review, Health Services Research, Health Affairs Scholar, the Journal of Health Economics, and Health Economics.

Smith holds a BA in mathematics from St. Olaf College and a PhD in health services research, policy, and administration, with an emphasis in health economics, from the University of Minnesota.