CAREER: Empirical Studies of Incentive Design, Information Technology Use, and Productivity in Physical Markets

Project Outcomes Statement

This NSF CAREER Award had two primary components, a research component and an education component. The research completed under this award focuses on medical provider information and financial incentives, with an eye towards how these levers impact physician productivity and downstream patient health outcomes. Under this grant, we developed two large-scale granular datasets in this area. The first is a dataset set up in partnership with the Hawaii Medical Service Association (HMSA) with detailed information on patient behavior, physician behavior, and HMSA policy changes related to information provision and incentive pay-for-quality payments. The second is a dataset set up in partnership with the University of California at San Francisco with audit log data on providers in the emergency department. These data provide information over a two year period on every interaction between physicians and the Electronic Health Record system at UCSF, including the creation of and access to medical notes, medical orders, and other key health care inputs. This dataset also contains detailed information on patient and physician characteristics. The final research papers using these two datasets are currently in progress.

The education component of this award set up the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) Health Care Bootcamp. This bootcamp is an intensive workshop in health economics that connects students to top researchers in this growing field. Many economics Ph.D. students nationwide are interested in health economics, but most universities lack the scale, either on the faculty side or the student side, to teach dedicated programs in this area. The NBER Bootcamp brought together a diverse set of students, in terms of their personal backgrounds and their academic backgrounds, with the goals of providing intensive, coordinated training in this area and helping students establish productive research networks with other like-minded researchers. The bootcamp was held three times (2018, 2019, 2022) and covered topics related to health insurance markets, the industrial organization of health provider markets, innovation in drug markets, behavioral economics and health decisions, organizational economics in health care, machine learning and empirical analysis in health markets, as well as several other topics. Approximately 150 students applied to this bootcamp each year and roughly 35 students attended each year. Students provided significant positive feedback on the bootcamp and its impact on their professional careers.