Zulkarnain Pulungan, Ph.D.

Zulkarnain Pulungan leads the designs and executions of studies on health economics and outcomes research (HEOR), predictive analytics, risk modeling, performance measurement, epidemiology, disease management evaluation, health disparity and social determinants of health.

Zulkarnain has a strong quantitative background with more than 20 years of analytic experience in designing and executing various health care studies. He has been with Inovalon for more than 11 years in various roles. Prior to joining Inovalon’s life sciences team, he was Principal Research Scientist at Avalere Health, where he led a team of analysts in projects including, but not limited to, HEOR studies related to heart failure, cancer, agitation in Alzheimer dementia patients, rheumatoid arthritis and pneumonia; epidemiology studies on various diseases; developing disease progression measures; health plan performance measure improvements; predictive models related to post-acute care settings and identifying patients with agitation; and identifying social drivers of health associated with poor quality performance.

Prior to joining Avalere, he led a team of analysts at Inovalon in various projects, including studies on disparities in outcomes in dual eligible and disadvantaged Medicare beneficiaries, star rating regional variation in Medicare Advantage issuers, socioeconomic risk adjustment on medication adherence measures, and healthcare utilization in the ACA population.

Before this, he specialized in quality measurement and improvement research at Leading Age New York and the Foundation for Long Term Care, where he developed, validated, and implemented quality measures and predictive models as part of innovative technology solutions to advance the use of data-driven decision making.

Zulkarnain received his Ph.D. in economics from the State University of New York at Albany, where he currently teaches a graduate level course in econometrics analysis.