About the firm
Assumptions Aside began in 2021 as a place to publish health and public policy analysis for a general audience, with interactive charts that reached the top of Google's results within two months. The same conviction runs the consultancy today: decisions about health care are only as good as the assumptions underneath them.
The name
Every model rests on assumptions: about costs and outcomes, about who gets counted, about what happens next. Most of them are reasonable, and some are not. The trouble is that they are rarely written down.
Our job is to surface each one, test it against the evidence, and set aside the ones that do not hold. What remains is an answer a payer, an HTA body or a state legislature can rely on.
- The comparator is obvious.
- Every patient has a diagnosis code.
- The threshold will not move.
- A public program cannot pay its way.
Look closely. Then look again.
Principles
- 01
Make the trade-offs visible
A decision about value is a decision about trade-offs. Our models show them openly, so the people deciding can see what they are giving up and what they are getting.
- 02
Trace every number
Primary sources first. Every claim is footnoted, every input sourced, every boundary stated. If a reviewer cannot follow the reasoning, the work is not finished.
- 03
Count who gets missed
Averages hide people. We stratify by race, place and payer, and we look for patients the data cannot see, because equity is part of the value question.
- 04
Built for the person deciding
Memos, briefings, dashboards and workshops, written for the program director, the access lead or the state official who has to act on them.
Anmol Kanotra is a health economist who builds, tests and defends the decision-analytic models behind coverage, pricing and public-funding decisions. She founded Assumptions Aside in 2021.
Her work covers both sides of the value question. On one side is evidence for global HTA bodies on behalf of manufacturers. On the other is a CDC-funded, societal-perspective evaluation of a state public health program. As Fractional Director of HTA & Evidence Generation Policy for DreamBig Health, she leads HTA and regulatory-policy strategy for a late-stage program, product-manages an AI market access platform, and built an NLP case-finding lexicon for a rare immune disease. As Primary Evaluator under a CDC cooperative agreement, she designed the cost-effectiveness analysis of Kentucky's school stock albuterol program.
Earlier, at FTI Consulting's Center for Healthcare Economics & Policy, she built cost-utility, budget-impact and scenario models across respiratory, metabolic, oncology and rare-disease portfolios. She also supported analyses of federal Medicaid and public-option proposals and led competition analyses for health-system mergers. Her work there became a co-authored cost-utility analysis published in ClinicoEconomics and Outcomes Research.
Outside client work she volunteers with the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), supporting fundraising, its national helpline and advocacy. She speaks English, Hindi and Spanish.
Education
MSc, International Health Policy (Health Economics), Merit
London School of Economics and Political Science · 2019
BS, Economics (Highest Honors) · BBA, Finance (High Honors)
University of Louisville · 2016
Memberships
- ISPOR
- AcademyHealth
- APPAM
- American Economic Association
- MassBio
Toolkit
- Modeling
- TreeAge Pro, Excel / VBA
- Statistics & code
- R, SAS, Stata, SQL, Python
- Visualization
- Power BI, QGIS, amCharts
- Data
- MarketScan, MEPS, HCUP, SEER, Medicaid claims, BRFSS, ESSENCE, Medicare Cost Reports, ACS, CPS, REDCap
- Frameworks
- CHEERS 2022, ISPOR good practices, ICER value framework, NICE, IQWiG, HAS, CADTH, PBAC, EU JCA, Japan C2H
Path
- 2016
University of Louisville
BS Economics & BBA Finance
Research on how ACA coverage expansion affected access to care for Kentucky Medicaid.
- 2017
Healthcare Strategy Group
Data Analyst
Physician workforce planning and a $21M network-wide health system assessment.
- 2019
Syneos Health, London
Value, Access & Outcomes Research
Pricing and cost-effectiveness modeling for antimicrobial-resistance treatments.
- 2019
London School of Economics
MSc International Health Policy
Health economics specialization, with Merit.
- 2020
FTI Consulting
Center for Healthcare Economics & Policy
HEOR models, health-policy analysis and competition economics. Consultant III to IV.
- 2021
Assumptions Aside
Founded
An independent health economics practice, based in Boston.
- 2023
Kentucky Asthma Management Program
Primary Evaluator, via Assumptions Aside
CDC-funded cost-effectiveness evaluation of school stock albuterol.
- 2025
DreamBig Health
Fractional Director, via Assumptions Aside
HTA & evidence generation policy, an AI market access platform, and NLP phenotyping.
Work with us
Tell us about the launch, the coverage question or the program that needs to show its value. We will tell you what evidence it needs, and what it can do without.