HCP’s John Z. Ayanian and Alan M. Zaslavsky publish study on annual preventive physical exams | Department of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School

HCP professors Alan M. Zaslavsky, PhD (left), and John Z. Ayanian, MD, MPP

HCP’s John Z. Ayanian and Alan M. Zaslavsky publish study on annual preventive physical exams

HCP professors John Z. Ayanian, MD, MPP, and Alan M. Zaslavsky, PhD, together with Ateev Mehrotra, MD, MPH, of the University of Pittsburgh (a former postdoctoral fellow at HCP), studied the number, cost, and content of preventive health and preventive gynecological exams across the United States. In this first study to systematically quantify these factors, the researchers found that the rates and content of such exams varied and that their annual costs ran to some $7.8 billion. This study is an important contribution to the national debate about the value of annual exams.

The study was widely covered in the news media. Read the coverage from Boston.com and front-page stories in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and USA Today. Read the abstract at the Archives of Internal Medicine.