Interdisciplinary Health Seminar: Ashish Jha, MD (Harvard)
**CANCELLED : “Variation in Spending on Post-Acute Care: What Does It Have to Do with Quality?”
**Will be rescheduled next semester.
Abstract: Much of the increase in Medicare spending over the past decade is caused by growth in spending in the post-acute period, after patients are discharged from the hospital but often not quite ready to go home. I will show data on how variations in post-acute spending seems to explain much of the variation in healthcare spending in the Medicare population, and then, present work-in-progress that examines which types of institutions seem to have lower levels of post-acute spending compared to others. Finally, I will present preliminary data on the relationship between quality of care and post-acute spending to determine whether there may be instances where focusing on high quality inpatient care might save us money in the longer run.
Speaker: Ashish Jha, MD, MPH
Ashish K. Jha, M.D., M.P.H. is Director for the Harvard Global Health Institute, K.T. Professor of International Health & Health Policy at the Harvard School of Public Health, Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and a practicing Internal Medicine physician at the VA Boston Healthcare System. Dr. Jha received his M.D. from Harvard Medical School and trained in Internal Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco where he also served as Chief Medical Resident. He completed his General Medicine fellowship from Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School and received his M.P.H. from Harvard School of Public Health. Dr. Jha’s major research interests lie in improving the quality and costs of healthcare with a specific focus on the impact of policy efforts. His work has focused on a broad set of issues including transparency and public reporting of provider performance, financial incentives, health information technology, and leadership, and the roles they play in fixing healthcare delivery systems.