Founded in 2019 and supported with a 5-year $1.9 million grant from the American College of Radiology’s Harvey L. Neiman Health Policy Institute, the IMPACT Research Center is the only imaging-focused health policy research group embedded within an academic radiology department. Dr. Richard Duszak (an interventional radiologist and nationally recognized health policy thought leader) and Dr. Michal Horný (a health economist and nationally recognized imaging-focused health services researcher) lead a team of faculty, trainees, and analysts.  

The IMPACT Research Center has partnered with other health services researchers at Emory University to obtain access to multi-year IBM Watson MarketScan files. These datasets include longitudinal healthcare claims for over 20 million Americans covered by employer sponsored health insurance. In addition, the IMPACT Research Center has recently obtained multi-year Nationwide Inpatient Sample (NIS) and multi-year Nationwide Emergency Department Sample (NEDS) files from the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project made possible through a Federal-State-Industry partnership sponsored by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). These files represent the largest available weighted sample datasets for inpatient and emergency department encounters across the United States. Additionally, the IMPACT Research Center has recently obtained access to the National Trauma Data Bank (NTDB) which is the largest aggregation of United States trauma registry data ever assembled. All of these datasets are housed on secure Emory University servers in a manner that permits access to the entire research team.

As one of the primary cores of the multi-core Harvey L. Neiman Health Policy Institute, the IMPACT Research Center investigators partner with collaborator cores at the Neiman Institute’s national office and Health Economics and Analytics Laboratory (HEAL) at the nearby Georgia Institute of Technology. The Neiman Institute has over 20 years of aggregated Medicare claims data and nearly 15 years of encounter-level Medicare claims data for a 5% sample of all Medicare beneficiaries. HEAL recently obtained access to Optum Real-World Data (claims data from United Healthcare for over 50 million covered United States lives).