Michael Chernew, PhD, is a professor in the Department of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School. One major area of his research focuses on assessing the impact of managed care on the health care marketplace, with an emphasis on examining the impact of managed care on health care cost growth and on the use of medical technology. Other research has examined determinants of patient choice of hospital and the impact of health plan performance measures on employee and employer selection of health plans.

Dr. Chernew is a member of 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 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 contributions to the field of health services research. Dr. Chernew is a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and is on the editorial boards of Health Affairs and Medical Care Research and Review. He is also coeditor of the American Journal of Managed Care and senior associate editor of Health Services Research.

Dr. Chernew received an AB from the University of Pennsylvania College of Arts and Sciences, a BS from the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School (economics), and a PhD in economics from Stanford University, where his training focused on areas of applied microeconomics and econometrics.