Senior Fellows
Michael Shwartz, Ph.D.
Dr. Shwartz is the Richard D. Cohen Professor in Management, and Professor of Health Care and Operations Management at the BU School of Management. He has been active in health services research and program evaluation for more than 30 years. His early activities focused on the development and use of mathematical models of disease processes to analyze the cost-effectiveness of screening programs, including breast cancer screening and the use of bitewing radiographs to detect dental caries. His more recent research has focused on issues related to health care costs, payment, utilization, appropriateness and quality of care. He has been involved in analyzing case mix and costs by major payers, by teaching hospital status and at public hospitals, and has an ongoing interest in practice pattern variations and provider profiling. Recently completed projects include an analysis of the effect of different approaches for adjusting for patient severity on the interpretation of hospital and patient outcomes; an analysis of the relationship between small area variations in Medicare hospitalization rates and the appropriateness of hospitalizations; and an analysis of the extent to which “more disease” accounts for small area variations in hospitalization rates. Underlying much of this work is the problem of risk adjustment, an area of long-term interest. Professor Shwartz regularly conducts a day-long workshop on risk adjustment at the AcademyHealth annual meeting. Over the last three years, he has been a member of the research team evaluating the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Pursuing Perfection Program. and is a co-investigator in the Commonwealth Fund-supported hospital quality improvement survey. He currently is a senior researcher at the Center for Organization, Leadership and Management Research within the Veterans Administration, and also is a Deputy Editor of Medical Care. He received his B.A. in economics from Johns Hopkins University, his M.B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley, and his Ph.D. in urban and regional planning from the University of Michigan.
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