Health Care Costs and Transparency

Tuesday, February 6, 2018 at 12:00 pm Milstein West B, Room 2019 1585 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge Wasserstein Hall, Harvard Law School

RSVP required to attend in person. Event will be live webcast at 12:00 pm.  

The Digital Health @ Harvard series features speakers from Harvard as well as collaborators and colleagues from other institutions who research the intersection between health and digital technology. The series is cosponsored by the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University and the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School. The goal of the series is to discuss ongoing research in this research area, share new developments, identify opportunities for collaboration, and explore the digital health ecosystem more generally. 

Health spending continues outpace wages and GDP, while some new insurance designs transfer greater shares of that to patients’ own out of pocket costs. In this talk, Dr. Freedman will discuss what is driving health care costs up, who is benefiting, and how data is harnessed to study problems and remedy them.

About Dr. John Freedman

John Freedman MD MBA has 30 years’ experience in care delivery, performance measurement & improvement, health IT, and health care reform. Before founding Freedman Healthcare, he held leadership roles at multiple innovative health care firms. Dr. Freedman served as Medical Director for Quality at Kaiser Permanente’s Colorado region, and as medical director for specialty services and coordinated care at New England’s largest community health center, overseeing 50 staff in 16 specialties. As medical director for quality and medical management at Tufts Health Plan, he helped them climb to a #2 national NCQA quality ranking. He has served on the boards of Massachusetts Health Quality Partners, Network Health (a 300,000 member Medicaid health plan), and the Fishing Partnership (which improves health in fishing communities). Dr. Freedman graduated Harvard College, U. of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, and the U. of Louisville School of Business. Freedman Healthcare is a leading consulting firm in health care reform, health policy analysis and development, and it has been engaged in many states to create all-payer claims databases, implement health insurance exchanges, and support health care transformation.