Health Economics
** This page regroups the work of the different teams I led while working at the Milken Institute. Last update March 2023.
We study evolving medical and lifestyle trends affecting people’s ability to sustain good health and focus on the policy implications of healthcare costs, resource constraints, regulatory environments, and behavioral factors. Our work focuses on:
- Public Health Risks — bridge the existing knowledge of public health risks with new realities by identifying and quantifying socio-economic determinants of public health and their resource implications.
- Health Disparity — investigate the extent of location-, gender-, and race-based health inequalities domestically and abroad. It identifies policy amenable drivers of disparities – and to develop a set of practical and politically feasible policy recommendations to improve public health.
- Health Policy Evaluation — measure health policy impacts and identifies effective policy alternatives that are based on credible, evidence-based solutions.
Projected Prevalence and Cost of Dementia: 2022 Update
The treatment prevalence and related costs have significantly increased in the past 10 years → + 31 percent since 2012 to $2.43 million. The latest estimates show that $47.5 billion are spent on comprehensive medical care and $12.8 billion on ADRD treatments. When it comes to ADRD and its costs, age, gender and race matter.
Informing Policy with County-Level Data: The Community Explorer
The Community Explorer investigates US health disparities by first understanding populations’ specificities then looking at their health profile. It identifies the different populations or communities based on their behavioral, demographic, economic, and social profiles. Then it links these profiles to chronic disease prevalence rates. The eight community profiles were identified by using Explanatory Factor Analysis and machine learning techniques, to sort 26 behavioral, demographic, economic, and social factors across 3,192 US counties.
Weighing Down America: 2020 Update
Obesity impacts segments of the US population differently based on their behavioral and socioeconomic profiles. The Milken Institute COVID-19 Community Explorer sorts US counties around eight profiles of communities that share common patterns across behavioral, economic, and social factors. This report uses these communities and identifies which of the 26 factors considered are systemically correlated with high obesity rates for each community.
How to Identify Health Innovation Gaps?
A disease’s cost and impact on society are challenging to assess. This Milken Institute analysis illustrates the benefit of new methods such as text mining and machine learning in merging and sorting information and argues for the necessary development of a metric that allows a systematic assessment of diseases’ cost, impact on society, and investment level.