The economics of chance: what random events reveal about forces shaping health
Speaker
Chance occurrences affect our lives all the time, but sometimes they can teach us about what works and doesn't work in health care. In this lecture, Anupam B. Jena uses natural experiments - real-world events that create study-like conditions outside the laboratory - to examine the hidden forces shaping health care.
A practising physician and PhD economist at Harvard Medical School, Jena has spent his career asking questions that randomised controlled trials cannot answer, exploring how physician behaviour, workforce dynamics, and structural features of health systems influence spending, quality, and patient outcomes. His work, published in the New England Journal of Medicine and JAMA and brought to wider audiences through his Freakonomics, MD podcast and national bestselling book, Random Acts of Medicine, reveals patterns in clinical behaviour that are both under-appreciated and consequential for policy, with implications for how we evaluate and design health systems.
Meet our speaker and chair
Anupam B Jena is Professor of Health Care Policy and Medicine at Harvard Medical School and an internist at Massachusetts General Hospital. One of a small group of physician-economists worldwide, he uses natural experiments to understand how healthcare works. He hosts the Freakonomics, MD podcast and authored the bestseller Random Acts of Medicine. His work is regularly featured in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal.
Joan Costa-Font is Professor of Health Economics at LSE, where he leads the Ageing and Health Incentives Lab and co-coordinates Ageing@LSE. A Fellow of the Royal Economic Society, his research spans health, ageing, and public policy. He has held fellowships at Harvard, Princeton, and Sciences Po, and held visiting professorships at Columbia, UCSF, UCL, and Oxford. He advises the WHO, World Bank, European Commission, and has contributed to NIHR committees and the Cabinet Office.
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