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I'm an Assistant Professor at Tulane University, and a health economist. I research how different payment schemes and technologies in healthcare change the way we care for patients and their results. I use real world data (medical claims, electronic medical records, etc) and quasi-experimental methods  to see how effective our medical care is. 

 

My goal is  to find out which medical tools and methods are worth it and which aren't. I also look into why we sometimes waste resources in healthcare, the policies that help or hurt new ideas in medicine, and how data interoperability can reduce waste in medical care. 

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I've looked at:

• How opioids, outpatient care, CT scans, and certain drugs help patients. Particularly, how  we should decide the price of such medical tools and who should get which treatment. Economists call this looking at "flat of the curve medicine" but it really just means finding what care adds more value than harm  (or no benefit) and for who. 

• How Medicare's price decisions affect innovation in kidney dialysis.

• How certain payment rules change the way hospitals care for patients.

• Right now, I'm looking at how a law called the Inflation Reduction Act changes the way we make medical tools and drugs.

During the Covid-19 outbreak, I studied its impact. I looked at:

• How reopening schools affected the spread of the virus.

• How the opioid epidemic got worse during this time. And the racial disparities it widened 

• The care that patients missed out on because of the virus.

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Part of executing this work involves finding appropriate real world data, suited for the question and context. I have used  Medicare claims, commercial claims, death data from obituaries, claims clearing warehouse data, electronic health records, genome linked EMR data and more. And so, I am naturally interested in data linkages and interoperability. 

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If you want to talk about research or healthcare data , email me at eziedan@tulane.edu.

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