Research Topic
Department
I am a health policy researcher using health insurance claims datasets and advanced empirical methods to examine factors affecting access to and quality of health care. My current work focuses on physician referrals and how patient care is coordinated among different physicians treating the same patient. To empirically measure these referrals, I use health insurance claims from nearly the entire non-elderly insured population in Massachusetts. I use economic modeling and social network analysis to examine the effects of organizational affiliations – and changes in these affiliations due to hospital mergers and acquisitions – on physician referral patterns. I also analyze the impacts of such patterns on health care cost and quality.
