Welcome! I’m Afia.

I am an MD-PhD candidate at the University of Chicago, where I study patient and provider decision-making using tools from applied microeconomics and natural language processing. Check out some of my research in progress below.

Quantifying Pre-Hospital Delays

How long do patients experience symptoms before seeking out healthcare? I develop and evaluate natural language processing approaches to extract symptom duration from clinical notes. These methods are used to explore causes and effects of pre-hospital delay.

Medical Bills and Subsequent Healthcare Consumption

Coauthored with Yashna Nandan and Yalun Su

After patients potentially receive a surprise, out-of-network medical bill, do they and their families change their healthcare consumption ? We study this question in large commercial claims data using differences-in-differences and matching.

You can find my CV here.