In 2016, CHPAMS established the Rising Scholar Best Paper Award to recognize outstanding peer review publications authored by CHPAMS members who are in their early career. For the 2018 Award, we received an unprecedented number of high-quality publications. A seven-member Award Committee completed two rounds of thorough and independent review of the applications and selected two papers as the winners. We are delighted to announce the following two papers and their lead authors as the recipients of the 2018 CHPAMS Best Paper Award!
Dr. Donglang Zhang, et al. “Expansion of Telestroke Services Improves Quality of Care Provided in Super Rural Areas” Health Affair. 2018 Dec;37(12):2005-2013
This paper presents trends in utilization of a two-way video conferencing telemedicine technology – telestroke – that connects large stroke centers and lower-resourced facilities to optimize acute stroke management in the U.S., and assesses the association between providing telestroke services and quality of care and medical expenditures, by urban versus rural county of residence among fee-for-service Medicare beneficiaries. The study finds that telestroke services have increased rapidly during the period from 2008 to 2015, with usage highest among patients in rural or super rural areas. Telestroke services improved quality of care and clinical outcomes, especially in super rural counties. The findings have important implications for policy dialogue aimed at reducing health disparities between rural and urban regions through expanding and reimbursing telemedicine technologies and services. Such evidence is also important and relevant to China’s health policy as China embraces emerging technologies in transforming its health delivery system to improve quality of care and reduce health disparities.
The paper’s lead author, Dr. Donglan Zhang, is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Health Policy and Management, College of Public Health, University of Georgia (UGA). She is also adjunct faculty at Shanghai Children’s Medical Center, affiliated with Shanghai Jiaotong University School of Medicine. Before joining the faculty at UGA, she worked as a prevention effectiveness fellow at U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. She received her PhD in Health Policy and Management from the University of California at Los Angeles in 2014. Dr. Zhang’s research has been focusing on insurance coverage and access to care and prevention of chronic diseases from a system perspective in the US and China.
Dr. Jing Li, “Plastic surgery or primary care? Altruistic preferences and expected specialty choice of U.S. medical students” J Health Econ. 2018 Nov;62:45-59
This paper is the first that rigorously measures altruism of U.S. medical professionals and uses it to predict career choice. The paper used a cutting-edge methodology developed in experimental economics to measure altruism among over 500 medical students recruited from schools around the U.S. The paper finds that medical students with a lower degree of altruism are significantly more likely to choose high-income specialties and also significantly predicts students' self-reported likelihood of practicing medicine in an underserved area. This altruism measure is more predictive of specialty than other characteristics, including parental income, student loan amount and Medical College Admission Test score. This paper demonstrates that laboratory measure of altruism can predict important real-world decisions of medical professionals, and highlights the need to enhance altruism level and potentially change the specialty distribution among future physicians. The tool for measuring altruism preferences can be adapted for use in different languages and countries, including China.
The paper’s sole author, Dr. Jing Li, is an Assistant Professor of Health Policy and Economics in the Department of Healthcare Policy and Research at Weill Cornell Medical College. Dr. Li obtained her PhD in Health Policy and MA in Economics from University of California, Berkeley. She also holds an MA in International Comparative Education from Stanford University and a BA in Economics & English from Peking University. Dr Li’s research focuses on examining the incentives and behaviors of healthcare providers, as well as their impact on healthcare resource allocation, especially in situations involving conflicts of interests between providers and patients.