Michael E. Chernew, PhD is a Professor of Health Care Policy in the Department of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School.
Dr. Chernew’s research activities have focused on several areas, most notably the causes and consequences of growth in health care expenditures. His most recent work has focused on designing and evaluating Value Based Insurance Design (VBID) packages that attempt to minimize financial barriers to high value health care services and simultaneously reduce costs. Several large companies have adopted these approaches, and Dr. Chernew’s ongoing work includes evaluations of these programs. Dr. Chernew also works closely with colleagues examining health care spending growth. Ongoing work explores geographic variation in spending growth and the relationship between individual and market factors in predicting rises in spending growth.
Dr. Chernew received his BA from the University of Pennsylvania, and his PhD in economics from Stanford University, where his training focused on areas of applied microeconomics and econometrics. He is the Co-Editor of the American Journal of Managed Care and Senior Associate Editor of Health Services Research. Professor Chernew is a member the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC), which is an independent agency established to advise the U.S. Congress on issues affecting the Medicare program. He is also a member of the Congressional Budget Office’s Panel of Health Advisors and the Commonwealth Foundation’s Commission on a High Performance Health Care System. In 2000 and 2004, he served on technical advisory panels for the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) that reviewed the assumptions used by the Medicare actuaries to assess the financial status of the Medicare trust funds. On the panels, Dr. Chernew focused on the methodology used to project trends in long-term health care cost growth. In 1998, he was awarded the John D. Thompson Prize for Young Investigators by the Association of University Programs in Public Health. In 1999, he received the Alice S. Hersh Young Investigator Award from the Association of Health Services Research. Both of these awards recognize overall contribution to the field of health services research. His 2008 article in Health Affairs, “Impact of Decreasing Copayments on Medication Adherence within Disease Management Program” was awarded the Research Award from the National Institute for Health Care Management. Dr. Chernew is a Faculty Research Fellow of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and he has served on the Editorial Boards of Health Affairs and Medical Care Research and Review.
Learn more about Dr. Chernew's work by viewing the following featured news article on 8/12/08 and news briefs on 9/23/09, 6/22/09, 6/10/09 and 2/25/08.