Dr. Sabbatini is an Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine and Adjunct Assistant Professor of Health Services. She works clinically in the Harborview and University of Washington emergency departments. As a federally-funded health services and policy researcher, Dr. Sabbatini has expertise in using claims and administrative datasets to study the how the delivery of hospital care affects patient outcomes, resource utilization, and quality. Much of her work has focused on examining the causes and consequences of preventable hospital admissions and especially the impacts of payor policies on hospital use and costs.
Dr. Sabbatini has funding from the National Institute of Mental Health and UW Population Health Initiative examining the effects of Washington state Medicaid policies on mental health care delivery and quality. She additionally is principal investigator on an R01 from the National Institute of Aging which is examining the effects of the growth of hospital observation stays on outcomes for older adults with unscheduled hospital admissions, including determining whether Medicare readmission policies have had unintended consequences for patients with observations stays.
Dr. Sabbatini received her BS in Neurobiology from the University of California, Irvine, her medical degree from Loma Linda University and completed residency in emergency medicine at the University of Chicago. For her health services training, Dr. Sabbatini received an MPH from the University of Southern California prior to medical school, completed a health services research fellowship in the Department of Emergency Medicine the University of Michigan. As junior faculty at the University of Washington, Dr. Sabbatini was awarded an institutional mentored career development award in patient-centered outcomes research from the Agency for Healthcare Quality and Research, where she further completed additional doctoral-level coursework in health economics, policy evaluation, and comparative effectiveness research.
