Biography
I am an economist with over 40 years work experience in the healthcare sector as a policy analysis, reimbursement consultant, commercial bank industry analysts, and professor conducting health services researcher. Currently, I am an associate professor of Health Policy and Management in the Rollins School of Public Health. In addition, I have a joint appointment as an Affiliated Associated Professor of Finance and Head of the MBA Concentration in Healthcare at the Goizueta School of Business, Emory University. Prior to joining Emory University, I held worked as a commercial bank loan offers managing a hospital revolving loan pool with loans to over 60 hospitals. In addition, I held health policy and health service research positions at both the American Medical Association and the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association. In these positions, I conducted health services research in the areas of alternative hospital reimbursement, health care financing, and physician labor supply.
During, my academic career, I have been an author on over 100 empirically based research articles on a broad range of health care topics. My primary health services research agenda has focused on examining the observed variation in the utilization of health care services and their cost by individuals. I have focused these studies on three populations: the elderly, individuals with limited access to the health care system, and individuals with chronic health care diseases. A second line of research includes evaluating the cost effectiveness of selected interventions in multi-year clinical trials, including managing the collection of healthcare cost data and the analytical work associated with estimating the cost effectiveness of the intervention. Finally, I perform a variety of data analytics and statistical analyzes on several large secondary health care administrative and claims databases to develop hospital bench-marking, clinical outcomes monitoring reports, and cost of care reports.
Education
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PhD in EconomicsUniversity of Illinois
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MA in EconomicsUniversity of Illinois
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BA in EconomicsThe College of Wooster
Electronic health records and the impact on workflow and costs
Healthcare practitioners and hospitals were initially slow to implement electronic health records (EHR) due to the perceived cost. The financial incentives from Medicare/Medicaid to adopt EHRs helped alleviate some of that concern, but the actual impact on workflow and profits, irrespective of those incentives, are still under investigation. In a research study, Steven D.