Q&A with Dr. Maja Kuharic: How Feeling Like a Burden Affects Patients’ Health Care Decisions

When Maja Kuharic arrived in the United States from Croatia, she had three suitcases — one full of shoes — and no job lined up. But with her master’s degrees in pharmacy and health economics, she secured a job as a pharmacist at a homeless shelter in Florida.

“It showed me how complex health care in the United States becomes when you have access barriers to health care and a lot of financial struggles, so I wanted to influence the systems on a larger level,” she said.

Kuharic went on to earn her PhD in health outcomes from the University of Illinois at Chicago as a Takeda fellow and briefly worked in industry before landing a faulty position at Northwestern University. Kuharic received a 2025 PhRMA Foundation Faculty Starter Grant in Value Assessment and Health Outcomes Research for her work studying how patients’ self-perceived burden on their caregivers impacts their health care decisions.

Through interviews, surveys, and input from patients, caregivers, and health care professionals, Kuharic aims to identify ways to improve our understanding of care recipient self-perceived burden and the ways researchers measure the value of health care to better reflect patient experiences.

Watch this video to learn more about Kuharic and her research.

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