visiting Health economist pulls for patients

June 9, 2008

Dr. John F.P. Bridges, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Health Policy & Management at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health visited the University of Chicago Center for Health and the Social Sciences over the past 2 weeks.  As part of the Chicago Center of Excellence in Health Promotion Economics (CCEHPE) National Scholar Program, the Research Economist at the National Bureau of Economic Research and Senior Fellow at the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest taught a short course on conjoint analysis, a methodological tool not commonly understood or utilized in academic medicine, to University of Chicago Medical Center faculty and research staff.  With its sound theoretical foundation in economics, conjoint analysis is often used to study patient preferences.  

His research, in contrast to many health economists, looks at the demand side of health care.  He focuses on issues such as patient centered care and patient preferences as drivers of economic growth.  He believes that paternalistic concepts of shared decision making and pay-for-performance incentives may destroy the health care system by promoting one size fits all solutions.  Instead, Bridges suggests a model that assesses patients underlying attitudes and values, as opposed to making assumptions about these preferences based on demographic information such as age, gender, and race.

As an advocate for the patient-centered approach he says, “I don’t know what patients want to say.  I just know it’s important that they say it.”  To this end, Bridges founded The Patient: Patient-Centered Outcomes Research the first academic journal in medicine to solely present patients’ views through hard science in a systematic and unbiased way.  The inaugural issue of the journal was published in May 2008.
An economist by training, Bridges considers himself an academic grandson of University of Chicago’s Gary Becker, studying under Professor Michael Grossman at the City University of New York.  Bridges was pleased to meet the Nobel laureate during his stay.

Learn more about Dr. Bridges’s short course in Conjoint Analysis: http://chess.bsd.uchicago.edu/ccehpe/conjoint_analysis.html

Learn more about Dr. John F.P. Bridges: http://faculty.jhsph.edu/default.cfm?faculty_id=1718