Call for Papers
Evaluating Health Care Spending: Progress and Gaps in the Health Care
Statistical Infrastructure
On October 18 and 19, 2013, the NBER/Conference on Research in Income
and Wealth will hold a joint conference in the Washington DC area on
data progress and needs for health sectors. The Program Committee
consists of Ana Aizcorbe (Bureau of Economic Analysis), Colin Baker
(National Institute of Aging at the National Institutes of Health),
Ernst Berndt (MIT Sloan School and NBER), and David Cutler (Harvard
and NBER). A pre-conference for the paper presenters may take place
in July 2013 as part of the NBER Summer Institute in Cambridge,
Massachusetts; publication of 12-15 papers is anticipated in an
NBER/CRIW "orange book" volume.
Conference Theme
Health sectors in the United States have grown to nearly 20% of the
economy, raising questions about the sources of this growth, the
value of this spending and the stresses such spending will impose on
public and private sector budgets. At the same time, the sectors
continue to evolve in important ways, with changes in the
organizational structure of private insurance markets, the industrial
organization of caregivers, and the roles that governments play in
financing and delivering health care services. Moreover, advances in
health information and communications technologies and other
important innovations continue to improve how medical care is
delivered to patients, how outcomes are monitored, as well as the
services available to treat their illnesses.
While considerable progress has been made, the available data
infrastructure does not allow systematic study of the impact of these
changes with any degree of precision. For example, despite all the
anecdotal evidence of important innovations in this sector, the
official statistics imply negative productivity growth for medical
care industries. While much has been learned about the nature of
measurement problems that give rise to such counterintuitive
findings, progress in implementing improvements to the official
statistics has been slow and, as has been noted by a recent National
Research Council assessment (Accounting for Health, and Health Care:
Approaches to Measuring the Sources and Costs of Their Improvement,
Washington DC, National Academies Press, 2010) our ability to provide
unambiguous answers to these pressing questions remains woefully inadequate.
Researchers presenting papers at this conference will focus attention
on the ability of the available data infrastructure to speak to these
important questions. The important questions are many. One area
relates to assessing the impact of recent developments in the health
sector such as the introduction of Medicare Part D, implementation of
the Accountable Care Act, changes in US long term care markets,
organizational changes related to accountable care and related
private sector initiatives, changes in the health care provider
workforce, and regulatory impacts of FDA and CMS policies. Another
area relates to innovation, addressing our ability to study the
effect of policies to foster innovation and the accumulation of basic
scientific knowledge regarding diseases and their treatments, as well
as evaluating the patient outcomes resulting from the innovations.
Submission and Selection Process
We welcome submissions of abstracts (between one and five
double-spaced pages in length) for inclusion in the program. We
particularly welcome empirical papers that exploit large public
(MEPS, Medicare, Medicaid, VA) and private health care claims data
bases (e.g., United Ingenix, Pharmetrics, Lifelink, MedStat) that
have become increasingly available in recent years. These abstracts
should be submitted in PDF format to
http://www.nber.org/confsubmit/backend/cfp?id=CRIWf13
by 5:00 pm on August 31, 2012. Authors of proposals will be notified
whether their proposed paper has been accepted for the conference
program by 30 September 2012.
Received on Fri Aug 10 2012 - 08:33:25 EDT
