Anupam Jena, MD, PhD, Ruth L. Newhouse Associate Professor of Health Care Policy, Harvard Medical School; Physician, Department of Medicine, Massachusetts General Hospital

Overview 

One of the biggest challenges facing health care today is identifying what treatments and policy initiatives work and don’t work in real-world settings, particularly when early evidence on treatment effectiveness stems from highly controlled, small populations of patients and when treatments are costly. In this webinar, Anupam B. Jena, MD, PhD, the Ruth L. Newhouse Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School, discusses how natural experiments and big data can inform our understanding of what works and doesn’t work in health care- including in turbulent times such as the current COVID-19 pandemic.

About the Presenter

Anupam B. Jena, M.D., Ph.D. is the Ruth L. Newhouse Associate Professor of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School and a physician in the Department of Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital.  He is also a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research.  As an economist and a physician, Dr. Jena’s research involves several areas of health economics and policy including the economics of physician behavior and the physician workforce, health care productivity, medical malpractice, and the economics of medical innovation.  Dr. Jena received his MD and PhD in Economics from the University of Chicago. He completed his residency in internal medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital.  In 2007, he was awarded the Eugene Garfield Award by Research America for his work demonstrating the economic value of medical innovation in HIV/AIDS. In 2013, he received the NIH Director’s Early Independence Award to fund research on the physician determinants of health care spending, quality, and patient outcomes.  In 2015, he was awarded the International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research (ISPOR) New Investigator Award.  From 2014-15, Dr. Jena served as a member of the Institute of Medicine Committee on Diagnostic Errors in Health care. His work is frequently featured in the media, including New York Times, Washington Post, WSJ, NPR, Freakonomics, and others.