AP-NORC Center Experts

Jennifer Titus is a Senior Research Director in NORC’s Health Sciences Department. She has over 10 years of experience managing multi-mode survey data collection for a range of small and large-scale projects.

Titus has successfully managed complex in-person, telephone, and mail data collection, data delivery, and data dissemination tasks for large health surveys conducted for federal clients including the Nationwide Adult Medicaid Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (NAM CAHPS) for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the National Children’s Study (NCS) for the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and Racial and Ethnic Approaches to Community Health in the U.S. for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Currently, Titus also manages telephone and web surveys for The Associated Press (AP)-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and NORC’s Public Affairs Research team on a variety of topics including Americans’ knowledge of the Zika virus, experiences with long-term care, opinions on obesity, and attitudes toward aging.

Prior to NORC, Titus coordinated academic research studies funded by NIH and the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) for the Division of Prevention and Community Research at Yale University’s School of Medicine and at the Institute for Juvenile Research at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Michelle Kitchman Strollo, DrPH, MHS is a senior vice president of NORC’s Health Care Programs department with two decades of experience in policymaking and analysis, program development, administration, and evaluation. She leads and advises a number of projects related to public and private insurance including the CMS Medicare-Medicaid Coordination Office’s Financial Alignment Initiative – a demonstration to test new approaches to providing integrated service delivery and payment models for individuals enrolled in both Medicare and Medicaid. She also co-directs the CMS Nationwide Adult Medicaid CAHPS survey – the first-of-its kind national patient experience survey of adults in both the Medicaid fee-for-service and managed care delivery systems. Strollo oversees NORC’s work on Marketplace projects for CCIIO including developing a monitoring strategy for use of federal, state, and commercial data to facilitate Marketplace and Medicaid eligibility determinations. Strollo also leads development of NORC’s Provider Network IQ, a data analytics tool powered to generate market reports comparing qualified health plans’ provider network structure by specialty and county.

Before joining NORC, Strollo was the Director of Eligibility and Enrollment Policy and Operations for CMS/CCIIO where she directed policymaking and operations governing how the Federal marketplace determines eligibility and enrolls individuals into health insurance coverage. Prior to her federal service, Strollo was Associate Director for Long-Term Care at the D.C. Department of Health Care Finance, managing operations and oversight of the District’s Medicaid long-term care services programs. Strollo spent over a decade as a Principal Policy Analyst with the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation where she conducted research and policy analysis on the Medicare program. She holds a Doctorate in Public Health degree from the George Washington University Milken Institute School of Public Health, a Masters of Health Science degree in health policy and a certificate in health care finance from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and a Bachelor of Arts degree from Duke University.

Stephen M. Smith is Senior Vice President of Health Sciences at NORC. Smith brings more than 25 years of experience in statistical methods, survey design and implementation, collection of biomarker data and health care research. He provides oversight and direction for the 60 staff and over $20 million per year of research projects housed in the Health Care Research department. Mr. Smith also serves as NORC’s corporate oversight and data collection expert for the National Social Life, Health, and Aging Project (NSHAP), a project led by the Principal Investigator Linda Waite, Ph.D., at the University of Chicago that is breaking new ground in collection of biomarkers using field interviewers and assessing sensitive topics associated with social life among older Americans.

In his 16 years at NORC, Smith has served as Project Director on a range of health care and public health studies including the Hospital CAHPS survey of Patient Perceptions of Health Care Delivery (HCAHPS), a survey of Medicaid beneficiaries for an evaluation of Medicaid Health Insurance Flexibility Account Waivers, the Air Force Health Study, the Hanford Community Health Project, and the HIV Cost and Services Utilization Study (HCSUS) which was awarded the 2005 Policy Impact Award by the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR).

Prior to joining NORC, Smith spent several years conducting social research as a Senior Social Survey Officer in England’s Office of National Statistics (ONS). At ONS he worked on the Labor Force Survey, Census Validation Study, and a study on Electoral Registration.

Smith has co-authored papers that have appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association, the New England Journal of Medicine, Health Affairs, Journal of Health Promotion Practice, Health Services Research, Journal of Gerontology, Field Methods, and the Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes. He is a member of the American Association of Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) and has been a regular presenter at AAPOR’s Annual Conference. He is also a member of AcademyHealth.