Graduate Student Fellow Sarah Zheng Presents at Cornell Health Symposium
Sarah Zheng is a PhD candidate in the Operations and Technology Management department at BU’s Questrom School of Business. She received a bachelors in economics from Peking University, China and a masters in economics from BU.
Sarah’s research focuses on the intersection of operations management and data analytics to create and design more efficient systems and processes to improve performance within organizations. She is currently interested in how health care organizations can achieve better performance by improving their internal operations and implementing a cost-sharing system between the organization and its patients.
In a recent presentation at the 2016 Cornell Hospitality, Health and Design Symposium in Ithaca, NY, Sarah spoke about “The Impact of Internal Service Quality on Preventable Adverse Events in Hospitals.” The annual symposium brings together academic scholars and industry leaders who have an interest in exploring the rapidly evolving dynamics of hospitality and healthcare industries.
Sarah’s recent paper, “Reductions in Diagnostic Imaging with High Deductible Health Plans”, was published in Medical Care (Vol. 54, no.2; 2016, pp. 110-117) and is one of the few articles featured in the journal’s media release. In this paper, Sarah speaks about how “increased patient cost-sharing may contribute to reductions in diagnostic imaging utilization and spending.” The team looked at insurance data for 21 million adults and found that patients with high deductibles have fewer imaging tests. High deductible insurance plans have relatively lower premiums but high out-of-pocket costs. Such plans increase the percentage of cost that the patient pays, which helps to reduce unnecessary care. The hope of such plans would be for consumers to actively seek out cost-effective treatment given the high out-of-pocket expenses, but for a number of reasons, they end up avoiding medical care in general. Sarah’s paper has been featured in media outlets such as U.S. News & World Report and Wolters Kluwer.