Melissa A. Romaire

Melissa A. Romaire directs RTI's Aging, Low-Income and Uninsured Populations program and has over 15 years of experience evaluating innovations in behavioral health integration, rural health care, delivery system redesign, and preventive service use for Medicaid and Medicare beneficiaries. 

Dr. Romaire has led or currently leads evaluations of innovations in behavioral health service use for Medicaid enrollees with serious mental illness, integration of primary and behavioral health care, primary care practice transformation to the medical home, Medicare payment models for critical access hospitals in frontier regions, and chronic disease prevention for Medicaid and Medicare enrollees. Currently, Dr. Romaire serves as the Associate Project Director for the CMS-funded evaluation of the Medicaid Section 1115 Substance Use Disorder, Serious Mental Illness, and Reentry demonstrations, and she previously led evaluations of behavioral health homes and primary care/behavioral health integration in Maine and Colorado under the CMS-funded evaluation of the State Innovation Models Initiative.

She has extensive experience using quantitative methods to analyze health plan encounter data, Medicare and Medicaid claims data, and national survey data to examine health care use, costs, and quality.  Results of her work have been published in Psychiatric Services, Millbank Quarterly, Medical Care, Journal of General Internal Medicine, American Journal of Preventive Medicine, and Health Affairs.

Before joining RTI, Dr. Romaire worked for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), where she assisted states in the administration of their Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) and Medicaid reproductive health program.