Unlocking the power of health services research

Mar 14, 2012 by Adam C. Powell, Ph.D.

I became a healthcare economist as a result of my desire to help doctors and health insurance companies. Growing up during the 1990s, the (potential) Clinton Healthcare Reform was regularly discussed by my family. After years of living with providers and hearing about payers, I developed both a curiosity about health services research and an interest in making an impact on the field. This led me to explore the health IT industry while at MIT, and then to earn a Ph.D. in Health Care Management and Economics at The Wharton School’s program affiliated with The Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics.

During my years at Wharton, I worked on a lot of research that I felt had substantial power to benefit hospitals and health insurance companies. As an applied microeconomist, all of the work that I did involved data pertaining to real problems happening at real institutions. Working with real data is powerful, in that it enables you to test your theories by asking questions to the people behind the data. During those years, I spoke to radiologists, traumatologists, orthopedists, and physicians from a myriad of other specialties. I felt that I could not fully understand health insurance without working in the industry, so I spent a summer at Humana and did some consulting work for a Blue.

Unfortunately, during my time at Wharton, I did not have time to promote my research to potential clients in the payer and provider industries. As I feel that the work I did has the power to make a difference, I have joined Payer+Provider, a consulting firm that consists of a syndicate of health services researchers and physicians. Payer+Provider is unique in that it is a syndicate that exists to collectively commercialize the work of a group of health services researchers; bringing our papers into practice. Furthermore, Payer+Provider’s team of in-house physicians enables it to test out ideas internally before presenting them to clients, ensuring that physicians agree that all of the proposed solutions are viable.

Over the years, I have enjoyed taking complicated concepts and making them simple – both through this blog and through my research. I encourage you to check out some of the solutions that Payer+Provider is offering. I am confident that they are easy for people to understand, although their underpinnings are technically complex.