Jessica Ochalek
Research Fellow

Profile

Biography

Jessica Ochalek joined Economic Evaluation in the Centre for Health Economics in 2014. She was awarded her PhD on "Accounting for health opportunity costs in key decisions in healthcare resource allocation in low- and middle-income countries" by the University of York in 2023.

She has worked across sectors, in academia at Boston University and the nonprofit sector at the amFAR, the Foundation for AIDS research, and at different levels of healthcare provision, as an HIV/AIDS counsellor and lab technician at a clinic in Milwaukee (USA) and with international organisations and governments. Through her research at the University of York she has collaborated with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Health Intervention and Technology Assessment Program (HITAP, Thailand), the Ministry of Health (Malawi), Patented Medicine Prices Review Board (Canada), and Institute of Economic Growth (India).

Jessica is interested in the application of the principles and methods of economic evaluation to inform key questions in healthcare decision-making and resource allocation. Her principle areas of research expertise are the estimation of the marginal cost per unit of health produced by healthcare systems; methods to inform health benefits package design and move toward universal health coverage; analysis of how the value of pharmaceuticals provided under universal coverage is shared between manufacturers and healthcare systems; and the economic evaluation of health technologies within healthcare and across sectors.

She holds an MSc in Health Economics from the University of York, a MPH in Global Health from Boston University and a BA in Global Studies - Global Security from the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee, in addition to her PhD.

She is a member of the Immunization and Vaccine-related Implementation Research Advisory Committee (IVIR-AC) subgroup on the Meta-Analysis of Economic Evaluations (MAEE) of Vaccines, and a speaker at the 4th World Health Organization Fair Pricing Forum.

Departmental roles

Member of the Equality & Diversity Action Team (EDAT)

Research

Overview

Jessica is interested in the application of the principles and methods of economic evaluation to inform healthcare decision-making, particularly in low- and middle-income countries.

Research group(s)

• Economic evaluation

Teaching

Other teaching

Guest lecturer on the Health and Development and Evaluation of Health Care modules for the University of York Health Economics MSc programme.

Tutor on University of York short courses including Outcome Measurement York Expert Workshop, Advanced Methods for Cost-Effectiveness Analysis, Online Courses in Decision Modelling for Health Economic Evaluation.