Assistant Professor

Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai

Department of Health System Design and Global Health

1216 Fifth Ave, Suite 559A. New York, NY 10029

aaron.baum [at] mssm.edu

Bio

My research uses methods from empirical economics and statistics to evaluate and personalize the targeting of health services and policies. I have a PhD from Columbia University, where I studied health and development economics, and a BS in mathematics from the University of Chicago. I have a primary appointment in the Department of Health System Design and Global Health at Mount Sinai and a secondary appointment in the Department of Genetics and Genomic Sciences. I am also affiliated with the Veterans Health Administration (New York Harbor), the Department of Medicine at Stanford University, and the Harvard Center for Primary Care.

I have a long-term interest in improving access to quality health care services for vulnerable populations. I was part of the team that started City Health Works in Harlem NY, a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation funded organization that employs community workers to deliver home health coaching and care coordination services to Medicaid beneficiaries. I was also previously a technologist in residence at Cornell Tech, where I helped design a digital nutrition application to scale-up access to registered dietician services under Prof. Deborah Estrin, who was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2018. In partnership with the largest microfinance institution in Haiti, I was part of the team that developed a community health entrepreneur program that has now been scaled up to reach millions of rural, low-income women and children.

Publications

Baum A, Carroll M, Estrin D, Gunasekara L, Pollak JP (2015). Pushcart: Supporting and Scaling Nutritionist-Client Relationships. Proceedings of CSCW 2015: Workshop on Moving Beyond e-Health and the Quantified Self.

Baum A, Elize W, & Jean-Louis F. (2017). Microfinance Institutions’ Successful Delivery of Micronutrient Powders: A Randomized Trial In Rural Haiti. Health Affairs, 36(11), 1938-1946.

Baum A, Scarpa J, Bruzelius E, Tamler R, Basu S, & Faghmous J. (2017). Targeting weight loss interventions to reduce cardiovascular complications of type 2 diabetes: a machine learning-based post-hoc analysis of heterogeneous treatment effects in the Look AHEAD trial. The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology, 5(10), 808-815.

Baum A, Song Z, Landon, B, Phillips, R, Bitton, A Basu, S (2019). Health Care Spending Slowed After Rhode Island Applied Affordability Standards To Commercial Insurers. Health Affairs. 38:2, 237-245.

Baum A, Aguilar-Gomez S, Lightwood J, Bruzelius E, Glantz S, Basu S (2019). Estimating the long-run relationship between state cigarette taxes and county life expectancy. Tobacco Control. doi:10.1136/tobaccocontrol-2018-054686.

Scarpa J, Bruzelius E, Doupe P, Le M, Faghmous J, Baum A (2019). Assessment of Risk of Harm Associated With Intensive Blood Pressure Management Among Patients With Hypertension Who Smoke: A Secondary Analysis of the Systolic Blood Pressure Intervention Trial. JAMA Network Open. 2(3):e190005. doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2019.0005

Bruzelius E, Scarpa J, Zhao Y, Basu S, Faghmous J and Baum A. (2019). Huntington's disease in the United States: Variation by demographic and socioeconomic factors. Movement Disorders. doi:10.1002/mds.27653

Nuti S, Doupe P, Villanueva B, Scarpa J, Bruzelius E, Baum A (2019). Characterizing subgroups of high-need, high-cost patients based on their clinical conditions: a machine learning-based analysis of Medicaid claims data. Journal of General Internal Medicine. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11606-019-04941-8

Bruzelius E, ... Baum A, .. Singh P (2019). Satellite images and machine learning can identify remote communities to facilitate access to health services . Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, Volume 26, Issue 8-9, August/September 2019, Pages 806–812, https://doi.org/10.1093/jamia/ocz111

Majumdar, U, ... Baum A, ... Kishore, SP (2019). Multiple chronic conditions at a major urban health system: a retrospective cross-sectional analysis of frequencies, costs and comorbidity patterns. BMJ Open, 9(10).

Bruzelius E, Baum A. (2019). The Mental Health of Hispanic/Latino Americans Following National Immigration Policy Changes: United States, 2014–2018. American Journal of Public Health, (0), e1-e3.

Baum A, Barnett ML, Wisnivesky J, & Schwartz MD. (2019). Association Between a Temporary Reduction in Access to Health Care and Long-term Changes in Hypertension Control Among Veterans After a Natural Disaster. JAMA Network Open, 2(11), e1915111-e1915111.