Alisa Busch, MD, MS, is an instructor in psychiatry and instructor in health care policy at Harvard Medical School and McLean Hospital. She also practices psychiatry at McLean Hospital’s Alcohol and Drug Abuse Treatment Program.
Dr. Busch’s primary research interests are in mental health policy and services research. In particular, her interest is in measuring and improving treatment quality on a system-wide level so as to help translate the benefits of clinical research into usual care practice for patients with psychiatric illness. She has conducted research examining quality of care in the public and private sectors for psychiatric illnesses such as depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and co-occurring substance-use disorders. She is a current recipient of a Career Development Award from the National Institute of Mental Health focused on examining the quality of care for bipolar disorder. Through this award she is examining how best to use clinical trial data in determining patient and provider characteristics to predict bipolar disorder outcomes; apply that information to a usual care insurance dataset to simulate outcomes and the system cost-effectiveness for bipolar disorder; and determine clinic site characteristics associated with bipolar disorder treatment quality and outcomes. With this award she is also examining how new medication technology diffuses into usual care treatment for bipolar disorder.
Dr. Busch recently examined the effect of implementing comprehensive parity for mental health and substance use disorders in the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program on quality of care for major depression. She has published several papers examining changes in the quality of care for depression, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia, as well as the effect of managed care carve-outs on quality.
Dr. Busch graduated with honors from New York University with a BA in English. She received her MD degree from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and her MS in health policy and management from the Harvard School of Public Health.