Education

• PhD, Applied Economics, University of Minnesota, 2000
• MS, Agricultural and Resource Economics, Colorado State University, 1990

Experience

Yvonne Jonk, PhD, is Deputy Director of the Maine Rural Health Research Center (MRHRC) and Associate Research Professor in the graduate program in public health at the University of Southern Maine, Muskie School of Public Service. As a health economist, she brings her expertise in claims analyses and cost- and cost-effectiveness analyses to her research with the MRHRC. Her areas of specialization also include rural health, access to care, health insurance coverage, and program evaluation. Her current portfolio in the MRHRC includes research on nursing homes and health care access among the rural elderly, non-emergent use of emergency room services, and opioid prescribing among the rural elderly. Jonk leads the MRHRC’s collaboration with the Universities of Iowa and North Carolina on the Rural Telehealth Research Center, analyzing claims data to study national telebehavioral health and Maine telehealth use. She also participates on the Flex Monitoring Team, most recently on the EMS performance measurement project.

Research Interests

• Access to care and insurance coverage
• Health economics, statistics and econometrics
• Health services research & policy analysis
• Rural EMS
• Rural healthcare delivery systems
• Telehealth