Research - Health Care - Harvard Business School

09 Jan 2018
Working Paper Summaries

Identifying Sources of Inefficiency in Health Care

by Amitabh Chandra and Douglas O. Staiger

                          This economic study finds evidence of allocative inefficiency and substantial variation in comparative advantage across hospitals, with the benefits from treatment being much higher in some hospitals than others. The study overall suggests new directions for research...

08 Jan 2018
Video

Brain-Based Training for Lifelong Fitness

                      
                          Longtime HBS fitness specialist Don Sweatt, promotes brain-based training for optimized performance and lifelong fitness and health. Working from the belief that everyone is an athlete, his mind-body approach incorporates drills for vision, balance, and joint...

January 2018
Article

The Effect of Cost Sharing on an Employee Weight Loss Program: A Randomized Trial

By: Leslie K. John, Andrea Troxel, William Yancy, Joelle Y. Friedman, Jingsan Zhu, Lin Yang, Robert Galvin, Karen Miller-Kovach, Scott Halpern, George Loewenstein and Kevin Volpp

Purpose: We tested the effects of employer subsidies on employee enrollment, attendance, and weight loss in a nationally-available weight management program. Design: A randomized trial tested the impact of employer subsidy: 100%; 80% 50% and a hybrid 50% subsidy that...

December 2017 (Revised April 2018)
Case

The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia: Network Strategy

By: Michael E. Porter, Thomas W. Feeley and Toyin J. Okanlawon

In 2009 Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) had been recognized as the best children's hospital in the country for six years in a row; but leadership saw CHOP as more than the large main campus in western Philadelphia. Beginning in the 1990s, CHOP had created a...

11 Dec 2017
News

There’s a medical ‘land grab’ underway as hospitals try to get larger

Re: Leemore Dafny

                          “It feels like a land grab on the part of some systems, seeking to get larger,” said Leemore Dafny, a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School. “Once a couple of these are announced, then more start to get underway, because people don't want to...

07 Dec 2017
News

Innovation is key to solving America's health-care problems

By: Bill George

                          As politicians debate who should pay for America's declining health and ever-increasing cost of health care, they are overlooking the key to simultaneously improving the health of Americans and cutting costs: innovation.

01 Dec 2017
News

2017 in Health Care: Telemedicine Has Arrived

By: founder emeritus, Rock Health; angel investor; adjunct professor, Columbia Business School Halle Tecco (MBA 2011)

                          The technology behind telemedicine—health care delivered remotely and asynchronously—has been improving for years, but in 2017, the United States hit a tipping point. This year, Kaiser Permanente’s CEO announced that of the company’s 100 million–plus patient encounters...

13 Nov 2017
News

Carrum Health Wins Harvard Business School and Harvard Medical School Health Acceleration Challenge

                      
                          BOSTON—Carrum Health, a San Francisco-based company offering a comprehensive bundled payment solution for employers, has been named the winner of the 2017 Health Acceleration Challenge by the Forum on Health Care Innovation, a collaboration between Harvard...

Article

The IT Transformation Health Care Needs

By: Nikhil R. Sahni, Robert S. Huckman, Anuraag Chigurupati and David M. Cutler

In recent years, health care organizations have made sizable investments in information technology. They’ve used their IT systems to replace paper records with electronic ones and to improve billing processes, thereby boosting revenue. But so far, IT has been of little...

2017
Working Paper

Identifying Sources of Inefficiency in Health Care

By: Amitabh Chandra and Douglas O. Staiger

In medicine, the reasons for variation in treatment rates across hospitals serving similar patients are not well understood. Some interpret this variation as unwarranted and push standardization of care as a way of reducing allocative inefficiency. However, an...

Article

Electronic Health Record Adoption in U.S. Hospitals: The Emergence of a Digital “Advanced Use” Divide

By: Julia Adler-Milstein, A Jay Holmgren, Peter Kralovec, Chantel Worzala, Talisha Searcy and Vaishali Patel

November 2017
Article

A Retrospective Analysis of Hypertension Screening at a Mass Gathering in India: Implications for Non-communicable Disease Control Strategies

By: S. Balsari, P. Vemulapalli, M. Gofine, K. Oswal, R. Merchant, S. Saunik, G. Greenough and T. Khanna

Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of mortality from noncommunicable diseases (NCD) in India. The government’s National Programme for Prevention and Control of Cancer, Diabetes, Cardiovascular Diseases and Stroke seeks to increase capacity building, screening,...