Dr. Ulrike (Ulli) Muench is Professor in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences in the UCSF School of Nursing and affiliated faculty at the Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies, Healthforce Center, and the UCSF Division of Clinical Informatics and Digital Transformation (DoC-IT). She is a health services and policy researcher with training in applied economics and a clinical background as a nurse and nurse practitioner. Her research focuses on the healthcare workforce, care delivery, and the quality and equity of care for older adults.
Dr. Muench’s research examines healthcare workforce and policy, clinician practice, and care delivery. Her workforce research addresses gender and racial and ethnic inequities, labor market outcomes and mobility, and the effects of policies on clinical practice and care delivery. She has conducted extensive research on nurse practitioners and other clinicians, including studies of prescribing and practice patterns, scope-of-practice regulation, and clinician contributions to primary care, specialty care, behavioral health, and nursing home care.
A growing area of her research examines care delivery for older adults, particularly people living with cognitive impairment and dementia, across primary care, nursing homes, and home health settings. Within this work, she has developed a particular focus on pain and pain treatment, including disparities in pain care, changes in treatment as cognitive and communication abilities decline, and relationships among chronic pain, depression, cognitive aging, and dementia. She is a Project MPI in the NIA-funded Triangulation of Innovative Methods to End Alzheimer’s Disease (TIME-AD) program project, where she co-leads research on depression and chronic pain as potentially modifiable factors in cognitive aging and Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias.
Methodologically, Dr. Muench specializes in quantitative health services research using large administrative, clinical, survey, and workforce datasets and advanced data analytics. She has particular expertise in Medicare and other CMS data and EHR data, as well as extensive experience with nationally representative surveys, including the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS), American Community Survey (ACS), American Time Use Survey (ATUS), and National Sample Survey of Registered Nurses (NSSRN). Her research includes linking data across sources, identifying clinician care in administrative claims, evaluating state policy changes, and applying causal inference methods to observational data.
Dr. Muench led the SON AI Science and Scholarship Roadmap and serves on the steering committee for the SON AI Roadmap. As a Co-Investigator on the NIA-funded National Dementia Workforce Study (NDWS), she contributes to survey development, scope-of-practice data, and linkage of national workforce surveys with Medicare and other administrative data.
Dr. Muench welcomes inquiries from prospective PhD students interested in quantitative health services and policy research, including healthcare workforce and policy, care delivery for older adults, aging and dementia, pain, and the use of data analytics and emerging technologies in health services research, as well as students seeking advanced training in quantitative methods.