Designing Benefits for Employee Productivity and Retention with Dr. Bapu Jena, Professor of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School

This episode features an interview with Dr. Bapu Jena, an economist, physician, and professor at Harvard Medical School. He bridges his professions to explore the economics of healthcare productivity and medical innovation. Bapu is also a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research and practices medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital.

In this episode, Sasha and Bapu discuss his book Random Acts of Medicine, provider-level quality scoring, and designing employer-sponsored benefits.

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“If you're an employer and you're thinking about how to structure your benefits for your employees, you're going to think about which hospital systems you want them to have access to. You're going to think about what doctors’ groups or doctors’ practices you want them to have access to. Naturally, you're going to want to have information on what is the quality of those places. But then how do you measure quality? What we might say about a particular doctor in terms of their quality, might be a function of their actual skill and the true quality that they provide. It could also be a function of the resources that their practice has, or the types of patients that they see. If you want to know something about what is the true effect of seeing that particular doctor, you've got to sidestep all these thorny empirical problems.” – Dr. Bapu Jena

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Episode Timestamps:

*(01:09): How the fields of healthcare and economics correlate with each other 

*(04:02): Bapu dives into his book Random Acts of Medicine

*(10:09): What provider-level quality scoring is and how it works 

*(18:00): Bapu’s thoughts on employer-sponsored benefits 

*(25:21): Good spend versus bad spend when building benefits plan designs

*(27:29): Challenges providers and payers will face as healthcare evolves  

*(36:33): Bapu shares his favorite healthcare story

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Links:

Read Bapu’s book Random Acts of Medicine

Random Acts of Medicine Substack

Listen to Freakonomics MD Podcast

Connect with Sasha on LinkedIn

Learn more about Collective Health

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