HBHI is pleased to announce five pilot grant awardees for our 2023 cohort.  We sought pilots which advance HBHI’s mission to incubate or accelerate collaborative research within the domains of at least one of the HBHI strategic pillars:

Market competition and healthcare policy

Health delivery performance

Health of populations and health equity

Innovation – health technology and systems

Read about the winning pilots and teams below.  Congratulations on such excellent proposals!

The Hopkins Health System Trust Index

PI: Michael Darden, PhD, Carey Business School; Mario Macis, PhD, Carey Business School; and Theodore Iwashyna, MD, PhD, School of Medicine and Bloomberg School of Public Health

Project Description: We propose to build the Hopkins Health System Trust Index (HHSTI) to measure and monitor Americans' level of confidence in the public and private institutions that influence the health of individuals and communities, as well as its determinants and effects. Data for the index will come from a novel representative survey of Americans, which we will administer. Our vision is for the HHSTI to be measured annually, providing snapshots and, eventually, a broader view of how trust in America's health system and its various components shifts over time and in response to events and policy reforms.

Plans, Providers, and Patients, Oh My! Differences in Use of Life-Saving Treatment for Opioid Use Disorder between Commercial Insurance and Medicaid

PI: Mark Meiselbach, PhD; Karen Shen, PhD; and Alene Kennedy-Hendricks, PhD all from Bloomberg School of Public Health

Project Description: Medications for opioid use disorder (MOUD) cut the risk of overdose death in half. Yet, less than 20% of individuals with OUD receive MOUD. This treatment gap has many drivers, including stigma, strict regulation, inadequate provider training, and insurance factors. Notably, Medicaid enrollees with OUD are 70-90% more likely to receive MOUD than enrollees in commercial insurance plans. The reasons for the substantially higher rates of MOUD in Medicaid compared to commercial insurance are unclear and may be health plan coverage-, provider-, or patient-driven. In this proposed project, we aim to understand the contributions of these factors to the MOUD treatment difference between Medicaid and commercially insured enrollees with OUD.

A Double-Edged Sword? Examining the Relationship Between Patient Satisfaction and Physician Overprescription

PI: Gordon Gao, PhD, MBA, Carey Business School; Junjie Luo, PhD student, School of Medicine; and Ritu Agarwal, PhD, MBA, Carey Business School

Project Description: Patient satisfaction is a measure of healthcare quality that recently has become more salient with healthcare reimbursement models increasingly utilizing this. Given the structure of incentives, does a relatively heavy emphasis on patient satisfaction as a quality measure negatively affect physicians’ clinical decisions? In this study, we aim to link Medicare Part D data, the OneKey dataset, and an online reviews repository that includes all active practicing physicians in the U.S. We will apply Natural Language Processing (NLP) to our unique corpus online reviews to construct an index of physician sensitivity to patient satisfaction and will then link that index to pain management prescription data from Medicare Part D, with physician and market factors as moderators. Our study will focus on pain management diagnoses and treatments made by primary care physicians.

Impact of Medicare Advantage on Quality of Care: Evidence from Osteoporotic Fragility Fractures

PI: Amit Jain, MD, MBA, School of Medicine; Kelly Anderson, PhD, MPP, University of Colorado; and Michael Darden, PhD, Carey Business School

Project Description: A recent systematic review found that current evidence is inconclusive on whether Medicare Advantage (MA) is superior to traditional Medicare (TM) for care outcomes. Unlike TM, MA plans use managed care practices, which may have differential impacts on beneficiary health and access to care. Our goal is to study MA health care delivery performance by comparing quality of care (measured through clinically relevant outcomes) in patients with osteoporotic fragility fractures who select into MA vs. TM.

Exploring Health and Wealth: Developing Novel Approaches to Understanding the Impact of Economic Precarity on Hospital Outcomes among Patients with Depression in the JHU System

PI: Elizabeth Stuart, PhD; Bloomberg School of Public Health; Peter Zandi, PhD, MPH, School of Medicine; and Catherine Ettman, PhD, Bloomberg School of Public Health

Project Description: Financial assets such as savings, wealth, and debt are associated with depression and ability to access treatment. Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems have used a variety of methods to measure patient finances, but no system currently uses operational billing data (i.e., number of days of overdue bills or total amount of debt sent to collections). Using EHR for JHU patients with depression from the Precision Medicine Center of Excellence (PMCoE) on Mood Disorders, we aim to conduct a concordance analysis, assessing the association of traditional socioeconomic factors with novel operational data. This proof-of concept study will allow us to explore new variables for creating asset profiles for patients which could provide a more accurate way to predict and address patient outcomes.

Our gratitude also goes to this year’s review committee members: Matthew Eisenberg, Yaa Owusua Akosa Antwi, Tinglong Dai, Kevin Frick, Kathy McDonald, Hemalkumar Mehta, Luis Quintero, Jodi Segal, Eric Slade, Haiyang Yang, and Meng Zhu!