Research - Health Care - Harvard Business School

2019
Working Paper

HIV Tests and AIDS Treatments: Case Histories of Significant Medical Advances:

By: Amar Bhidé, Srikant M. Datar and Katherine Stebbins

We describe how a diverse cast of characters including public health organizations, research laboratories, for-profit health care companies, activists, and regulators rolled back the outbreak of HIV/AIDS in just 15 years. Moreover, as the case history shows, a stunning...

2019
Working Paper

Mammography: Case Histories of Significant Medical Advances

By: Amar Bhidé, Srikant M. Datar and Katherine Stebbins

We describe how the development of x-ray–based techniques and equipment (“mammography”) lead to widespread screening for breast cancer and enabled “minimally invasive” biopsies of breast tumors. Specifically, we chronicle how 1) new protocols and equipment catalyzed...

2019
Working Paper

Ultrasound: Case Histories of Significant Medical Advances

By: Amar Bhidé, Srikant M. Datar and Katherine Stebbins

We describe how efforts on multiple fronts, including advocacy, training, and technological development made ultrasound the second most commonly used diagnostic imaging technology (after x-rays). Specifically, we chronicle 1) ultrasound’s development and introduction...

2019
Working Paper

Magnetic Resonance Imaging: Case Histories of Significant Medical Advances

By: Srikant M. Datar, Amar Bhidé and Katherine Stebbins

We describe how and why Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) came to complement—and partially replace—Computed Tomography (CT) imaging of soft tissue. Specifically we chronicle the following: 1) the development of foundational techniques and prototypes (through the 1970s);...

Summer 2019
Article

The Price Effects of Cross-Market Mergers: Theory and Evidence from the Hospital Industry

By: Leemore S. Dafny, Katherine Ho and Robin S. Lee

We consider the effect of mergers between firms whose products are not viewed as direct substitutes for the same good or service but are bundled by a common intermediary. Focusing on hospital mergers across distinct geographic markets, we show that such combinations...

20 Jun 2019
News

What Tech Pioneers Can Learn From Emerging Markets

Re: Tarun Khanna

                          Technology leaders are not shy about pushing the boundaries of their industries, and sometimes they go further — challenging the prevailing rules of society at large. Gene editing and stem cell treatments, for example, are advancing so rapidly that they threaten to...

17 Jun 2019
News

Cure All

Re: Leemore Dafny & Raffaella Sadun

                          Professors Raffaella Sadun and Leemore Dafny are both economists who have studied hospitals extensively—Sadun’s research has looked at the economics of management, while Dafny’s examines interactions between health care providers and payers, as well as antitrust...

2019
Working Paper

Female Inventors and Inventions

By: Rembrand Koning, Sampsa Samila and John-Paul Ferguson

Has the increase in female medical researchers led to more medical advances for women? In this paper, we investigate if the gender of inventors shapes their types of inventions. Using data on the universe of US biomedical patents, we find that patents with women...

2010
Article

Estimating the Attributable Cost of Physician Burnout in the United States

By: Shasha Han, Tait D. Shanafelt, Christine A. Sinsky, Karim M. Awad, Liselotte N. Dyrbye, Lynne C. Fiscus, Mickey Trockel and Joel Goh

Background: Although physician burnout is associated with negative clinical and organizational outcomes, its economic costs are poorly understood. As a result, leaders in health care cannot properly assess the financial benefits of initiatives to remediate physician...

28 May 2019
News

Physician Burnout Costs the U.S. Billions of Dollars Each Year

Re: Joel Goh

                          “Marketing costs to advertise the position, costs of hiring, costs associated with training and starting out a physician—all of these really add up pretty quickly,” says study co-author Joel Goh, an assistant professor at the National University of Singapore and a...

17 May 2019
News

Tackling high Rx prices

Re: Ariel Dora Stern

                          Brigham and Women’s epidemiologist Ameet Sarpatwari; Jonathan Darrow, a lawyer with the Brigham’s division of pharmacoepidemiology and pharmacoeconomics; and Ariel Stern, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School focusing on health care management, each gave a...

May 16, 2019
Article

To Improve Food Inspections, Change the Way They're Scheduled

By: Maria Ibanez and Michael W. Toffel

Health inspections are an important tool to increase food safety, but there are still 48 million cases of food-borne illnesses and 128,000 hospitalizations every year in the United States. Our research finds that inspectors reported fewer health code violations as they...