Health and Medicine

FSI’s researchers assess health and medicine through the lenses of economics, nutrition and politics. They’re studying and influencing public health policies of local and national governments and the roles that corporations and nongovernmental organizations play in providing health care around the world. Scholars look at how governance affects citizens’ health, how children’s health care access affects the aging process and how to improve children’s health in Guatemala and rural China. They want to know what it will take for people to cook more safely and breathe more easily in developing countries.

FSI professors investigate how lifestyles affect health. What good does gardening do for older Americans? What are the benefits of eating organic food or growing genetically modified rice in China? They study cost-effectiveness by examining programs like those aimed at preventing the spread of tuberculosis in Russian prisons. Policies that impact obesity and undernutrition are examined; as are the public health implications of limiting salt in processed foods and the role of smoking among men who work in Chinese factories. FSI health research looks at sweeping domestic policies like the Affordable Care Act and the role of foreign aid in affecting the price of HIV drugs in Africa.

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Amber E. Barnato is the Director of The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice. She is a board-certified preventive medicine and public health physician with advanced training in decision science. Her research focuses on variation in end-of-life intensive care unit (ICU) and life-sustaining treatment use. Barnato earned a BA from the University of California at Berkeley, an MD from Harvard Medical School, an MPH from the University of California at Berkeley, and an MS from Stanford University.
Photo of Amber Barnato

 

 

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Registration

 

Hybrid Seminar: Lunch will be provided for on-campus participants. 
Please register if you plan to attend, both for in-person and via Zoom.

Log in on your computer, or join us in person: 
Encina Commons, Room 119 
615 Crothers Way 
Stanford, CA 94305

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VA Medical Informatics Fellow
Global Health Postdoctoral Affiliate, Center for Innovation in Global Health (CIGH)
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Anu Ramachandran is a Medical Informatics Fellow affiliated with the VA's Center for Innovation to Implementation. She completed her medical degree at Johns Hopkins University and pursued a Masters degree in Public Health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine as a Marshall Scholar. She recently completed her residency in Emergency Medicine at UC San Francisco/SF General Hospital. Her prior research has focused on the health needs of populations affected by humanitarian crisis. Broadly, she is interested in the intersection of informatics methodologies and health policy, with a focus on crisis preparedness and protecting medically vulnerable populations. She also hopes to use these tools to improve health system design and optimize the resiliency and equity of healthcare delivery in low-resource settings.

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Postdoctoral Research Fellow
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Robert Gallo is a medical informatics research fellow in the Department of Health Policy and the VA Palo Alto Health Care System’s Center for Innovation to Implementation. He obtained his medical degree at Washington University School of Medicine, and subsequently completed his residency training in Internal Medicine at Stanford. Dr. Gallo’s research focuses on inpatient health services delivery, particularly for diabetes and cardiovascular disease. He also has interest in the evaluation and implementation of prediction models.

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Postdoctoral Research Fellow
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Duncan is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Health Services Research and Development, with the VA Center for Innovation to Implementation (Ci2i) and the Stanford Department of Health Policy. Duncan uses methods from computer science and operations research for resource allocation and decision making in applied settings. To ensure that these systems meet appropriate standards of quality and safety, he is also developing processes for governing and monitoring deployed algorithms in healthcare settings. Duncan’s past projects have focused on blood donor recruitment (with Facebook), kidney exchange (with UNOS), and financial services (with FinRegLab). He holds a PhD in Applied Mathematics (AMSC) from the University of Maryland, College Park.

Encina Commons, 103B
615 Crothers Way
Stanford, CA 94305

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Program Manager
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Teresa Puente is the Program Manager for the Prevention Policy Modeling Lab, which conducts health and economic modeling to improve public health decision-making and inform U.S. health policy. Teresa coordinates with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and academic partners, overseeing operations and management for over 30 modeling projects.
 
Prior to joining Stanford, Teresa worked in health policy and communications at the CDC, supporting efforts to communicate the agency’s work in global infectious disease, outbreak response, and immunization. She received her master’s degree in public health from Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health, with a focus on socio-contextual determinants of health.

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Postdoctoral Research Fellow Alumni
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Nathaniel Breg is a postdoctoral fellow at the Veterans Health Administration of Palo Alto in its Big Data Scientist Training Enhancement Program (BD-STEP) and a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Health Policy at Stanford. His research into health care provision intersects with questions in labor economics and industrial organization. His current work focuses on provider use of new medical technologies, and he is more broadly interested in provider incentives, medical labor markets, and the effects of the health care industry on local economies and local health. He has a PhD from Carnegie Mellon University in public policy and management with an applied economics concentration and a BA from Tufts University in economics and history. Before his graduate studies, he worked as an analyst at RTI International on health policy evaluation and implementation for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

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Postdoctoral Research Fellow Alumni
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Britni Wilcher, PhD, is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Health Services Research & Development. Dr. Wilcher earned her PhD in economics from American University in 2022. She is an applied microeconomist with interests in health, labor, and gender economics. Dr. Wilcher’s research focuses on the economics of health decision making and its implications for labor markets using quasi-experimental designs to draw causal inferences for historically disadvantaged populations. While completing her doctoral studies, Dr. Wilcher also conducted impact analysis of US regulations for think tanks and government agencies.
 
Prior to her doctoral studies, Dr. Wilcher completed a BA in Economics at Spelman College and MSc in International Health Care Management, Economics, and Policy at SDA Bocconi School of Management in Milan, Italy. During her masters, she specialized in the economics evaluation of pharmaceutical and medical devices. Dr. Wilcher applied that training as a senior consultant at Booz Allen Hamilton in Washington, DC and research fellow at the University of Exeter in England. Her work at Exeter, supporting an EU commission aimed at advancing the existing methodological framework for health technology assessment (HTA) of medical devices (MedtecHTA), was published in Value in Health, Health Economics, and the International Journal of Technology Assessment in Health Care.

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Register: bit.ly/3FTrJhg

Incentives for health behaviors are an increasingly important policy tool in both developed and developing countries, and there is widespread interest in improving their effectiveness. However, different contracts are likely to be more effective for different people. Mechanism design offers two strategies to improve contract effectiveness—tagging on observables (i.e., 3rd-degree price discrimination), and offering a menu of contract choices (i.e., 2nd-degree price discrimination)—but a key concern with both is that participants with private information might self-select into contracts that are favorable to the agent but less effective from the perspective of the principal. We adapt each of these strategies to customize incentive contracts for walking. Using a randomized controlled trial among more than 5,000 adults in urban India, we show that both mechanisms increase physical activity, leading to a 75% increase in steps walked relative to the effect of a one-size-fits-all benchmark. Moreover, we find that the concern that participants will self-select into less effective contracts is not only misplaced, but exactly backwards. Instead, a common force in health behavior settings—commitment motives—leads agents to prefer more effective contracts under both mechanisms. In particular, sophisticated time-inconsistent agents demand contracts that commit their future selves to walk more, bringing their preferences in partial alignment with the principal and improving the effectiveness of customization.

 

Ariel Zucker 111722Ariel Zucker is an assistant professor in the Department of Economics at UC Santa Cruz. Her research studies policies to improve health and environmental conditions among underserved communities worldwide. Many of her projects focus on countering behavioral biases in personal decision making. Prior to arriving in Santa Cruz, Dr. Zucker did a postdoc at UC Berkeley ARE, and earned her Ph.D. in economics from MIT.

Jianan Yang

Via Zoom Webinar.

Ariel Zucker Assistant Professor of Economics, University of California Santa Cruz
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Aleksandra Kuczerawy headshot on a blue background with text European Developments in Internet Regulation

Join the Program on Democracy and the Internet (PDI) and moderator Daphne Keller, in conversation with Aleksandra Kuczerawy for European Developments in Internet Regulation.

This session is part of the Fall Seminar Series, a months-long series designed to bring researchers, policy makers, scholars and industry professionals together to share research, findings and trends in the cyber policy space. Both in-person (Stanford-affiliation required) and virtual attendance (open to the public) is available; registration is required.

The Digital Services Act is a new landmark European Union legislation addressing illegal and harmful content online. Its main goals are to create a safer digital space but also to enhance protection of fundamental rights online. In this talk, Aleksandra Kuczerawy will discuss the core elements of the DSA, such as the layered system of due diligence obligations, content moderation rules and the enforcement framework, while providing underlying policy context for the US audience.

Aleksandra Kuczerawy is a postdoctoral scholar at the Program on Platform Regulation and has been a postdoctoral researcher at KU Leuven’s Centre for IT & IP Law and is assistant editor of the International Encyclopedia of Law (IEL) – Cyber Law. She has worked on the topics of privacy and data protection, media law, and the liability of Internet intermediaries since 2010 (projects PrimeLife, Experimedia, REVEAL). In 2017 she participated in the works of the Committee of experts on Internet Intermediaries (MSI-NET) at the Council of Europe, responsible for drafting a recommendation by the Committee of Ministers on the roles and responsibilties of internet intermediaries and a study on Algorithms and Human Rights.

Daphne Keller
Aleksandra Kuczerawy Postdoctoral Scholar at the Program on Platform Regulation (PPR)
Seminars
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South Korea aspires to achieve the status of a global vaccine hub as a national strategic policy priority. South Korea’s biomanufacturing industry has ramped up the development and production of therapeutic treatments and vaccines to meet the public health demands of the pandemic. The government has responded by promoting public-private partnerships to expand vaccine production capacity to meet current and future needs domestically and abroad in LMICs. To bolster this strategy, the government has entered into partnerships with international organizations, namely the WHO, ADB, and IVI, by establishing training hub programs for a global biomanufacturing workforce in 2022.

This paper examines South Korea’s mechanisms and strategy towards becoming a vaccine hub, the origins of which predate the Covid-19 pandemic but were again spurred by vaccine nationalism and challenges to access early in the pandemic.

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Publication Type
White Papers
Publication Date
Journal Publisher
Korea Economic Institute of America
Authors
Irene Kyoung
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