Olga Yakusheva

Olga Yakusheva, PhD, MSE, is an economist and esteemed researcher who has led pioneering studies of cost-evaluation in the nursing industry. Dr. Yakusheva is a Professor of Nursing and Public Health at the University of Michigan School of Nursing. She led the design of the Healthcare Innovation and Impact Program (HiiP) at the nursing school in 2019 and was appointed to the position of the first HiiP Director. She is an Associate Economics Editor for the International Journal of Nursing Studies. Dr. Yakusheva’s research examines the work of nurses including efficiency, effectiveness, and the economic value of the nursing practice and leadership.

For the past 15 years, Dr. Yakusheva’s interdisciplinary research team has led ground-breaking research quantifying the value-added contribution of nurses to patient outcomes and to organizational financial outcomes. She is currently a Principal Investigator on several large federally funded studies to improve nurse staffing, reduce burnout, and support nurses’ professional development. Through her novel publications she has paved the way for the value-added model in nursing practice, which explores the convergence of nursing and economic theory for organizational transformation. She developed a new method to measure (via electronic medical records) outcomes-based clinician performance productivity to demonstrate the contributions of nurses on patient outcomes. She has spent the last decade promoting the economic value of nursing on the well-being and financial sustainability of the health system.

Dr. Yakusheva is a member of the Research Advisory Council of the American Nurses Association Enterprise (ANA), co-leading ANA’s new research priority around framing and articulating the economic value of the nursing profession. As an economic advisor to ANA, she is providing her expertise to inform the organization’s work toward developing policy and advocacy to improve the recognized value of nursing and implement payment policies that reflect the unique contributions and value of nurses. She is the lead author of the recent series in Nursing Outlook discussing the value of nursing practice and leadership in modern day health care.

Dr. Yakusheva continues to cultivate interdisciplinary approaches to impact policy and tackle the challenges facing health care today by working with industry leaders and studying the traits and success strategies of highly effective nurses. She is a rigorous scientist, a strong ally of the nursing profession, and one of the few PhD prepared economists embedded within a school of nursing, who is helping to shape the national dialogue regarding the economic contribution of nursing to the business model for health care delivery and financing.

Dr. Yakusheva completed post-doctoral training at Yale University, School of Medicine, and holds a PhD and an MS from the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, and a BS from Kazakh State University. Her educational background is in mathematics and labor economics, with specific expertise in economic methods for causal analysis in non-randomized studies and big data analytics.