Audrey is a principal research scientist with 20 years of experience leading health services research projects for federal clients including the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS). Her work has involved quantitative methods (e.g., quasi-experimental designs and surveys) as well as qualitative methods (e.g., environmental scans). She has a wealth of experience using real world data (RWD) in addition to conducting primary data collection.

Audrey has led teams performing research, statistical, and technical work on the AHRQ Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project (HCUP). She has conducted numerous research studies and co-authored dozens of publications on a variety of health care topics, including maternal and neonatal health outcomes, mental health and substance use disorders, social determinants of health, health disparities, geographic variations in health care, potentially preventable/chronic health conditions, hospital readmissions, COVID-19, and predicting medical needs in a disaster. Her work has included studies on patient outcomes, such as the relationship between receipt of inpatient drug detoxification/rehabilitation and patient hospital readmissions involving opioid-related conditions. Audrey also has been the Project Director for multiple CMS Medicare demonstration implementation contracts that have involved testing new value-based care and delivery system reform initiatives, including medical homes and cancer prevention/treatment.

As a certified Project Management Professional (PMP) and Professional Scrum Master I (PSM I), Audrey is experienced with all phases of project management including the use of agile approaches to most efficiently accomplish project objectives.

Weiss has a wide range of research publications, including analyzing mental health disorders among delivery inpatient stays by patient race and ethnicity (2022); examining racial and ethnic disparities in hospital stays with operating room procedures (2022); exploring contributors to disparities in postpartum readmission rates between safety-net and non-safety-net hospitals (2022); and investigating county-level determinants of high opioid-related hospitalization rates (2022). Other notable work includes identifying the most frequent reasons for emergency department visits (2021), assessing methods for calculating patient travel distance to hospitals using HCUP data (2021), and examining the impact of hurricanes on injury-related emergency department visits (2020). Weiss has also studied geographic variation in potentially preventable inpatient stays for chronic health conditions (2020) and readmissions following inpatient treatment for opioid-related conditions (2019).