"Lessons from Measuring Low-Value Health Care"
Aaron Schwartz, MD, PhD, is a health economist and physician currently serving as an internal medicine resident at Brigham and Women's Hospital. He completed MD-PhD training at Harvard Medical School. His research has explored Medicare and Medicaid policies, health care quality measurement, and the use of low-value health care services. A graduate of Swarthmore College, Dr. Schwartz received his PhD in Health Policy with an concentration in economics from the Harvard University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, where his dissertation was supervised by Joseph P. Newhouse, Michael E. Chernew, and J. Michael McWilliams. His research has been published in Health Affairs, JAMA Internal Medicine, and The New England Journal of Medicine, and has been featured in the Washington Post, Forbes, NPR, The New York Times and The New Yorker.
What can we learn from quality measures that detect instances of low-value medical services? Dr. Schwartz will summarize his research employing measures of low-value care in the setting of Medicare. Topics covered will include the incidence of low-value services, the footprint of provider organizations on low-value care, the effect of ACO contracts on low-value care, and variation and predictability of physician rates of low-value services.
