Publications

We use data from a long-running experiment in which American Indian households received income transfers from a casino while other households did not

Public pay-for-performance (P4P) programs tie hospital payments to predetermined sets of quality measures and are intended to encourage or discourage certain outcomes

Diagnostic effort, diagnostic testing, physician payment, healthcare operations management, artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) applications in healthcare could have algorithmic biases that perpetuate health disparities.

Policy makers and insurers promote the use of generic drugs because they can deliver large savings without sacrificing quality. But these efforts meet resistance from the public, who perceive generic drugs as inferior substitutes for brand name counterparts. Building on literature showing that negative emotions reduce risk-taking, the authors hypothesize that receiving bad medical news (i.e., negative information about one’s health) prompts patients to favor brand name over generic drugs as means to safeguard their health. The evidence exploits low-density lipoprotein cholesterol test results, where a discontinuity from clinical guidelines enables the authors to estimate the causal effect of bad medical news.

There is increased acceptance that social and behavioral determinants of health (SBDH) impact health outcomes, but electronic health records (EHRs) are not always set up to capture the full range of SBDH variables in a systematic manner. The purpose of this study was to explore rates and trends of social history (SH) data collection—1 element of SBDH—in a structured portion of an EHR within a large academic integrated delivery system.

We study the effects of changing Medicaid reimbursement rates for primary care services on behavioral health outcomes—defined here as mental illness and substance use disorders.

In August 2022, the US Food and Drug Administration issued the final rule to establish a new category of over-the-counter (OTC) hearing aids. Over-the-counter hearing aids are intended for use by adults with mild-to-moderate hearing loss without the need for an audiologist to adjust and program the device for the user’s level of hearing as is currently done for most conventional hearing aids. One key aspect of the effectiveness of these future OTC hearing aids is provision of the correct level of sound amplification based on the individual’s level of hearing. Thus, a feature to import prior hearing test (audiogram) results into these devices may be an important consideration to ensure optimal amplification of sound.

Despite growth in private equity (PE) acquisitions of physician practices in the US, little is known about how changes in ownership influence workforce composition. Using clinician-level data linked to practice acquisition information, we estimated changes in clinician workforce composition in PE-acquired practice sites relative to non-PE-acquired independent practice sites for dermatology, ophthalmology, and gastroenterology specialties.

Millions of older adults co-manage or delegate health responsibilities to one or more family caregivers. Patient portals facilitate health care management tasks, but little is known about portal use arrangements (i.e., individual or joint use) among older adults and their caregivers.