Principal Consultant
Optum
Jessica M. Franklin joined Optum in 2020 after 10 years as faculty in the Division of Pharmacoepidemiology and Pharmacoeconomics at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School. Dr. Franklin has extensive experience in designing and leading studies of the effectiveness, safety, and utilization of medications from large healthcare databases, including health insurance claims and electronic health records. She led the development and application of a wide range of novel methods in pharmacoepidemiology, such as automated variable selection and model building methods for propensity score adjustment, measures for evaluating covariate balance, and methods for incorporating free-text data into model building through natural language processing (NLP). She also co-founded the FDA and NIH-funded RCT DUPLICATE project focused on producing an empirical evidence base for the validity of real-world evidence on medications. She has authored or co-authored more than 150 articles in peer-reviewed medical, epidemiology, and biostatistics journals. Dr. Franklin is a fellow of the International Society for Pharmacoepidemiology, where she is currently serving on the board of directors. Dr. Franklin received a Bachelor of Science degree in mathematics from University of Georgia and a PhD in biostatistics from John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.