Anupam B. Jena, M.D., Ph.D. is an assistant professor of health care policy and medicine at Harvard Medical School and an assistant physician and professor in the Department of Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital, where he practices general inpatient medicine and teaches medical residents.
Dr. Jena’s research involves several areas of health economics and policy including medical malpractice, the economics of medical innovation and cost-effectiveness, geographic variation in medical care, and insurance benefit design. Using unique data from a nationwide professional liability insurer, Dr. Jena’s work on malpractice has provided new estimates of medical malpractice risk according to physician specialty, the costs of defending malpractice claims, and outcomes of malpractice claims undergoing litigation.
Dr. Jena’s work on the economic value of medical innovation has led to estimates of the societal value of innovation in HIV/AIDS and cancer. His work on HIV/AIDS was awarded the Eugene Garfield Award from Research America for the best paper in economics on the economic impact of medical research. Linking his work on medical innovation to the economics of cost-effectiveness analysis, Dr. Jena has argued that decision-making based on cost-effectiveness should consider the potentially negative impact of lower prices (and improved cost-effectiveness) on medical innovation.
Dr. Jena’s research on geographic variation in medical care has demonstrated that greater hospital spending is associated with lower inpatient mortality, highlighting the importance for U.S. policymakers to identify areas where health care spending is productive when deciding where to reign in growing health care costs.
Among the few studies to explore the importance of insurance benefit design in children, Dr. Jena’s recent study of children with asthma has shown that higher out-of-pocket medication costs are associated with lower medication and greater health care utilization.
Dr. Jena graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with majors in biology and economics. He received his MD and PhD in Economics from the University of Chicago, where he was awarded training fellowships from the NIH Medical Scientist Training Program and the NIA. During medical school, he was also an AHRQ post-doctoral fellow at UCLA/RAND. He completed his residency in internal medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital. Dr. Jena is a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a Fellow at the Schaeffer Center for Health Policy and Economics at the University of Southern California.
Learn more about Dr. Jena’s work by viewing the following featured news articles on 6/26/12, 4/13/2012, 7/2010, 9/2010, 3/2011, 5/2011, 7/2011, 8/2011, 3/2012, 3/2012, 5/2012 and newsbriefs on 2/11/13 nd 11/30/12.