The Benefits Playbook

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


Listen Later

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.

-------

“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

-------

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

-------

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

...more
View all episodesView all episodes
Download on the App Store

The Benefits PlaybookBy Collective Health

  • 5
  • 5
  • 5
  • 5
  • 5

5

11 ratings


More shows like The Benefits Playbook

View all
This American Life by This American Life

This American Life

90,558 Listeners

Planet Money by NPR

Planet Money

30,676 Listeners

Relentless Health Value by Stacey Richter

Relentless Health Value

235 Listeners

Pivot by New York Magazine

Pivot

9,297 Listeners

The Daily by The New York Times

The Daily

110,863 Listeners

The Journal. by The Wall Street Journal & Spotify Studios

The Journal.

5,947 Listeners

Self-Funded With Spencer by Spencer Smith

Self-Funded With Spencer

37 Listeners

Morning Wire by The Daily Wire

Morning Wire

26,491 Listeners