We're kicking off the fall semester of the Public Health Speaker Series in conjunction with the Center for Health Economics and Policy. Together, we are pleased to welcome Meredith Rosenthal, the C. Boyden Gray Professor of Health Economics and Policy at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health and the Faculty Chair of Harvard’s Advanced Leadership Initiative.

Rosenthal will present her talk “Understanding the Causes and Consequences of Care Cascades that Result from Low-Value Services”. Routine medical tests may trigger cascades of further medical services that are of uncertain value and can cause substantial harms to patients. Understanding the prevalence of these tests and their cascades would allow payers, policymakers, and clinicians to prioritize and target efforts to mitigate low value care and its consequences. We used national Medicare claims data to estimate the prevalence of specific routine tests performed to identify patient, area-level, and visit characteristics associated with receiving these tests, and to measure the prevalence and cost of their cascades -- attributable laboratory tests, imaging tests, procedures, visits, hospitalizations and new diagnoses that follow.

The lecture is free and open to the public. It will be a hybrid event, streaming live from Brown Lounge.

We're kicking off the fall semester of the Public Health Speaker Series in conjunction with the Center for Health Economics and Policy. Together, we are pleased to welcome Meredith Rosenthal, the C. Boyden Gray Professor of Health Economics and Policy at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health and the Faculty Chair of Harvard’s Advanced Leadership Initiative.

Rosenthal will present her talk “Understanding the Causes and Consequences of Care Cascades that Result from Low-Value Services”. Routine medical tests may trigger cascades of further medical services that are of uncertain value and can cause substantial harms to patients. Understanding the prevalence of these tests and their cascades would allow payers, policymakers, and clinicians to prioritize and target efforts to mitigate low value care and its consequences. We used national Medicare claims data to estimate the prevalence of specific routine tests performed to identify patient, area-level, and visit characteristics associated with receiving these tests, and to measure the prevalence and cost of their cascades -- attributable laboratory tests, imaging tests, procedures, visits, hospitalizations and new diagnoses that follow.

The lecture is free and open to the public. It will be a hybrid event, streaming live from Brown Lounge.