The Hopkins Business of Health Initiative (HBHI) is proud to formally welcome Melinda J.B. Buntin, PhD, has just been announced as Johns Hopkins’ newest Bloomberg Distinguished Professor.
Please check out the University’s story celebrating her arrival and detailing her distinguished career as a health economist and health policy leader advancing our understanding of health care delivery and cost growth, with an emphasis on improving the value created by the health care system.
In addition to joining the leadership team at HBHI as its Director of Policy, Dr. Buntin will serve as director of Hopkins’ newly established Center for Health Systems and Policy Modeling, through which she and her team aim to address emerging issues in health policy with rigorous empirical work—predictive models and causal inference methods from econometric study designs—with the goal of providing evidence to the health care sector, businesses, and policymakers on how to improve health care delivery and outcomes.
One primary focus of the center is to develop the first comprehensive “supply-side” model of the U.S. health care system. The Health System model will provide policymakers, health care providers, and businesses with insights into the ways in which incentives and institutional structures shape care delivery and outcomes–and how policy and business decisions can alter them.
Dr. Buntin was recruited into the Knowledge to Action and Business of Health group, one of the 9 Bloomberg Distinguished Professorship Clusters. “When I first heard from Melinda about what she hoped to do at Hopkins, I was incredibly excited to support her recruitment,” said Dan Polsky, director of HBHI, “and we are thrilled to have her here. She will be a phenomenal collaborator with other HBHI Core Faculty and Bloomberg Distinguished Professors.”
