Catalyst

David Asch is Executive Director of the Penn Medicine Center for Health Care Innovation. He is the John Morgan Professor at the Perelman School of Medicine and Professor of Health Care Management and Professor of Operations, Information and Decisions at the Wharton School.

Dr. Asch’s research aims to understand and improve how physicians and patients make medical choices in clinical, financial, and ethically charged settings, including the adoption of new pharmaceuticals or medical technologies, the purchase of insurance, and personal health behaviors. His research combines elements of economic analysis with psychological theory and marketing in the field now called behavioral economics. He is the author of more than 300 published papers.

He teaches health policy at the Wharton School and he practices internal medicine at the Philadelphia Veterans Affairs Medical Center, where he created and from 2001 to 2012 directed the Center for Health Equity Research and Promotion—the Department of Veterans Affairs’ national center to support vulnerable populations and reduce racial disparities. From 1998 to 2012 he was Executive Director of the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics.

He has received numerous awards for teaching, research, and innovation at the University of Pennsylvania and nationally. He is an elected member of the Association of American Physicians and the National Academy of Medicine (formerly, Institute of Medicine).

Dr. Asch received his bachelor’s degree from Harvard University, his MD from Weill-Cornell Medical College, and his MBA in Health Care Management and Decision Sciences from the Wharton School. He was a resident in Internal Medicine and a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania.

Dr. Baicker is C. Boyden Gray Professor of Health Economics and Chair of the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. She is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and an elected member of the Institute of Medicine. Professor Baicker serves as a Commissioner on the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission; as Chair of the Massachusetts Group Insurance Commission; on the Congressional Budget Office’s Panel of Health Advisers; as a Director of Eli Lilly; on the Editorial Boards of Health Affairs, the Journal of Health Economics, and the Journal of Economic Perspectives; and as past Chair of the Board of Directors of AcademyHealth. From 2005-2007, she served as a Senate-confirmed Member of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, where she played a leading role in the development of health policy.

She received her BA in economics from Yale and her PhD in economics from Harvard. Professor Baicker’s research focuses primarily on the factors that drive the distribution, generosity, and effectiveness of public and private health insurance, with a particular focus on health insurance finance and the effect of reforms on the distribution and quality of care. Her research has been published in journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine, Science, Health Affairs, and the Quarterly Journal of Economics, and has been featured in outlets such as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and National Public Radio. She is currently one of the leaders of a research program investigating the many effects of expanding health insurance coverage in the context of a randomized Medicaid expansion in Oregon.

Niteesh K. Choudhry, M.D., Ph.D., is an internist and health services researcher whose work focuses on the development and evaluation of novel strategies to improve health care quality and reduce spending. He is an Associate Professor Medicine at Harvard Medical School, the founding Executive Director of the Center for Healthcare Delivery Sciences and an Associate Physician in the Division of Pharmacoepidemiology and Pharmacoeconomics, at Brigham and Women's Hospital, where he is also a practicing hospitalist. Much of Dr. Choudhry’s current research deals with non-adherence to evidence-based medications, a problem that is estimated to cost almost $300 billion annually in the U.S. alone. He has led and is leading numerous clinical trials embedded in real-world health systems aimed at addressing this issue.

A second focus of Dr. Choudhry’s work is predictive analytics: he seeks to identify which patients will ultimately become non-adherent to their prescribed therapies and why and when this will occur. He and his colleagues have applied and evaluated novel quantitative methods for clustering patients into longitudinal and dynamic adherence trajectories, shown their relationship to long-term clinical outcomes, and demonstrated the capacity to predict a patient’s membership in each of these adherence trajectories with great accuracy. In ongoing work, he and his colleagues are exploring the ability of novel data sources, such as retail purchasing information and electronic health record data, to improve the ability to predict future non-adherence. Dr. Choudhry, who is Canadian by upbringing, attended McGill University, received his M.D. and completed his residency training in Internal Medicine at the University of Toronto and then served as Chief Medical Resident for the Toronto General and Toronto Western Hospitals. He earned his Ph.D. in Health Policy from Harvard University. He has published over 175 peer-reviewed journals and has won numerous awards for research, teaching and mentoring.

Dr. Epstein graduated from Harvard College in 1983, Harvard Medical School in 1988 and completed his Residency and Fellowship in Medicine and Cardiology at the Brigham and Women's Hospital, where he also completed an HHMI Postdoctoral Fellowship in Genetics. In 1996 he accepted a position as Assistant Professor of Medicine in the Division of Cardiology at the University of Pennsylvania. He is currently the Executive Vice Dean and Chief Scientific Officer, William Wikoff Smith Professor of Medicine, and former Chairman of the Department of Cell and Developmental Biology and the Scientific Director of the Penn Cardiovascular Institute.

Dr. Epstein has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the Sir William Osler Young Investigator Award from the Interurban Club (2001) and the Outstanding Investigator Award from the American Federation for Medical Research (2006). He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, American Association of Physicians, Past President of the American Society for Clinical Investigation and a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences. He serves on several editorial boards, and is a past Deputy Editor of the Journal of Clinical Investigation. Dr. Epstein was a founding co-director of the Penn Institute for Regenerative Medicine in 2007. Dr. Epstein’s research has focused on the molecular mechanisms of cardiovascular development and implications for understanding and treating human disease. His group has been at the forefront of utilizing animal models of congenital heart disease to determine genetic and molecular pathways required for cardiac morphogenesis, with implications for pediatric and adult cardiovascular disease. Stem cell, angiogenesis and epigenetic studies have had direct implications for the development of new therapeutic agents for heart failure and myocardial infarction. Dr. Epstein is a practicing cardiologist at the Philadelphia Veterans Administration Hospital.

Scott Halpern is Associate Professor of Medicine, Epidemiology, and Medical Ethics and Health Policy at the Perelman School of Medicine of the University of Pennsylvania, and a practicing critical care medicine doctor. He is the founding Director of the Fostering Improvement in End-of-Life Decision Science (FIELDS) program, which seeks to understand and improve upon the healthcare decisions made by seriously ill patients and their family members and clinicians. He is also the founding Director of Penn’s Critical Care Health Services Research group, which seeks to improve the equity and efficiency of care delivery for patients with acute and critical illnesses. Finally, Dr. Halpern is the Deputy Director of the Center for Health Incentives and Behavioral Economic (CHIBE), where he develops behavioral economic interventions that motivate smoking cessation, research participation, and reductions in the use of low-value healthcare services.

Dr. Halpern has received the United States’ most prestigious awards for young academics in bioethics (the Greenwall Foundation Faculty Scholar Award in 2008) and in health services research (AcademyHealth’s Alice S. Hersh New Investigator Award in 2011). In 2012, Dr. Halpern was 1 of 10 recipients of the Young Leader Award as part of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s 40th Anniversary, recognizing people aged 40 or under who offer “great promise for leading the way to improved health and health care for all Americans.” He is an elected member of the American Society of Clinical Investigation, a member of the Editorial Boards of the Annals of Internal Medicine and the American Journal of Bioethics, and from 2013 – 2015 he was an Anniversary Fellow at the Institute of Medicine. Dr. Halpern has authored more than 120 peer-reviewed articles and 50 editorials, reviews, and chapters. His research has been featured in every major media outlet, and he consults on scientific and ethical matters for several federal organizations.

Punam Keller is the Charles Henry Jones Third Century Professor of Management and Associate Dean for Innovation and Growth at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. At Dartmouth, she teaches Social Marketing to the MBA students and Strategic Marketing to health practitioners getting a Masters in the Science of Health Care Delivery. Professor Keller’s general area of expertise lies in consumer decision-making and choice behavior. Her specific research interest is in how health communication processing strategies can improve health message effectiveness. Her research has been published in marketing, psychology, and health journals. She serves on the Editorial Boards of the top marketing journals, the Journal of Consumer Research, the Journal of Marketing Research, and the Journal of Public Policy and Marketing. She is an Area Editor for the Journal of Consumer Psychology and past President of the Association for Consumer Research.

Through the years, she has served as a consumer research consultant and marketing trainer to a variety of health providers including CVS/Caremark, Humana, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Eli Lilly, Astellas, Aetna, Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center, New York Presbyterian Hospitals, and CDC. She served on CDC’s cancer sub-committee and has partnered with CDC to create a marketing tool for customizing, defending, and measuring the effectiveness of health communications. The free online tool, MessageWorks, is available to the public at healthcommworks.org. As a member of the Behavioral Consumer Research Group and Adherence Panel at CVS/Caremark, she leads a variety of projects to increase prescription drug adherence. Her compliance tool, ENABLE (Efficient-Novel-Active-Behavioral-Levers) contains empirically tested interventions to increase employee compliance and reduce corporate health costs. She is a board member of PSI (Population Services International (PSI), the largest NGO providing health products and services to the poorest most isolated people in the world.

Dr. Thomas Lee is Chief Medical Officer of Press Ganey and an internist and cardiologist who practices at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. He is a Professor of Medicine, part time, at Harvard Medical School and Professor of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard School of Public Health. Prior to joining Press Ganey, he served as Network President for Partners Healthcare System and CEO for Partners Community HealthCare, Inc., the integrated delivery system founded by Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital.

He is a member of the Board of Directors of Geisinger Health System, Chairman of the Board of Directors for the Geisinger Health Plan, Geisinger Quality Options, Inc., and Geisinger Indemnity Insurance Company Board of Directors. He is also a member of the Board of Directors of Health Leads; the Board of Overseers of Weill Cornell Medical College; the Special Medical Advisory Group (SMAG) of the Veterans Administration; and the Panel of Health Advisors of the Congressional Budget Office. He is a member of the Editorial Board of the New England Journal of Medicine.

He is the author of more than 300 academic articles and four books, Chaos and Organization in Health Care, Eugene Braunwald and the Rise of Modern Medicine, An Epidemic of Empathy in Healthcare, and The Good Doctor.
Named in his honor, the Thomas H. Lee Award for Excellence in Primary Care is given each year to recognize a primary care physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital who meets the needs of his or her patients exceptionally well.
Tom holds a bachelor’s degree in History and Science from Harvard College, a medical degree from Cornell University Medical College, and a master’s degree in Epidemiology from the Harvard School of Public Health. He lives in Milton, Massachusetts, with his wife, Dr. Soheyla Gharib, who is Chief of Medicine at Harvard University Health Services. The couple has three daughters.

Patient Engagement: Behavioral Strategies for Better Health

February 25, 2016

Philadelphia

Overview

Agenda

Presenters

David A. Asch, MD, MBA

Katherine Baicker, Ph.D.

Niteesh Choudhry, M.D., Ph.D.

Jonathan A. Epstein, M.D.

Scott D. Halpern, M.D., Ph.D.

Punam A. Keller, Ph.D.

David Kirchhoff, MBA

David Laibson, Ph.D.

Thomas H. Lee, MD, MSc

Wendy Wood, Ph.D.

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