CBOH Faculty Director, Dr. Bradley Staats, writes in Harvard Business Review how retailers and health systems can improve care together.

Taming the rising costs of prescription drugs has been a focus of U.S. healthcare reform for the past decade. High drug prices limit patient access while also contributing to higher overall healthcare costs. Recently, issues of how drug list prices are set, who reaps the benefits, and how those costs are passed on to patients have come under increased scrutiny.

As healthcare costs continue to rise, many Americans are looking to artificial intelligence to provide cost-reducing solutions.

Joshua Barrett, Associate Director of Research, spoke at an online seminar hosted by the University of Toronto’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health. The seminar was titled, 'Nursing perspectives on health equity and commercial determinants of health'.

The Center for the Business of Health and the Kenan Institute held an exclusive lunchtime conversation with Dr. Craig Albanese, CEO of Duke University Health System, and Dr. Wesley Burks, dean of the UNC School of Medicine and CEO of UNC Health.

As the 2023 UNC Business of Healthcare Conference approaches, this overview provides a brief introduction to the topic, "What’s Driving Healthcare Prices?"

An editorial published by CBOH Associate Director of Research, Joshua Barrett, in the journal Clinical Nursing Research concerning the commercial determinants of health (CDoH).

As payments from the National Opioid Settlement and other opioid-related lawsuits are distributed to local governments across the country, the question many communities are asking is, 'How should we spend the funds?'

This paper presents the development, validation, and implementation of a data-driven optimization model designed to dynamically plan the assignment of anesthesiologists across multiple hospital locations within a large multi-specialty healthcare system. 

Health care costs in the United States make up a larger proportion of gross domestic product (GDP) than in any other developed country and continue to rise. We examine whether the use of consistent metrics in costing information systems across hospitals provides one avenue to reduce these costs.

The UNC Center for the Business of Health and the Institute for Private Capital recently co-hosted a research symposium to explore the impacts of private equity on the healthcare industry. This report aims to provide an overview of private equity in healthcare, examine how private equity operates in today's healthcare landscape, and outline the top challenges and opportunities currently faced by private equity in the industry. The key takeaways were derived from the insights shared by expert panelists and contributors from various sectors, including the healthcare industry, clinical practice, private equity firms, academia, and government. This symposium was conducted under Chatham House Rules.

About 27% of diabetics also suffer from depression, and the presence of co-morbid depression could increase the cost of care for diabetes by up to 100%. Several randomized clinical trials have demonstrated that physical and mental health are more likely to improve for diabetes patients suffering from depression when regular treatment for depression is provided in a primary care setting (called Collaborative Care). An important operational lever in managing Collaborative Care is the allocation of the care manager’s time to enrolled patients based on their requirements, which in turn influences the revenue, costs, and patient health outcomes. We present a mathematical modeling approach that determines the optimal allocation of care manager’s time and quantifies the costs and benefits of Collaborative Care. In particular, we model Collaborative Care management at the clinic level as an infinite horizon Markov Dynamic Program. The objective is a weighted sum of total patient QALYs and the clinic profits. The model incorporates insurance payment, resource utilization costs, and disease progression of comorbid diabetes and depression. We derive structural properties of the optimal allocation of the care manager’s time. Using these structural properties, we develop a practical and easy-to-implement solution approach that performs close to the optimal solution. We calibrate the model with data obtained from a large academic medical center and show that our solutions could potentially improve total QALYs and clinic profits when compared to current practices. We also perform sensitivity analysis to different payment models to derive insights relevant to healthcare policy.