Amol Navathe, MD, PhD

Biography

Amol Navathe, MD, PhD, is Professor of Health Policy and Medicine and a Senior Fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute for Health Economics at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a Vice Chair of the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC), a non-partisan agency that advises the US Congress on Medicare policy. He also directs the Parity Center. 

As a practicing physician, health economist, and engineer, Dr. Navathe has extensive expertise in policy analysis and design, physician and hospital economic behavior, and application of informatics and predictive analytics to health care. His work on advanced health data analytics and technology to improve healthcare delivery has been implemented at numerous large insurers and health systems. He has applied his skills to payment and delivery transformation, including applications of behavioral economics to clinician decision making, and federal policy for health care evidence development and data infrastructure.

Dr. Navathe completed his medical training at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and his post-graduate medical training at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital at Harvard Medical School. He obtained his PhD in Health Care Management and Economics from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.  

Dr. Navathe is a leading scholar on payment model design and evaluation, particularly bundled payments. His scholarship is unique because of its bi-directional translation between basic scientific discovery and real-world practice, including focus on: (1) the impact of value based care and payment models, such as cardiac bundles, on health care value; (2) financial and non-financial incentive design, including applications of behavioral economics, to drive clinician practice change; and (3) a mix of pragmatic clinical trials and observational data analyses. Current projects include design and evaluation of primary care payment and specialty bundles models, optimal use of performance feedback (e.g., to decrease opioid prescribing), and applying predictive models to drive behavior change.  

The most distinctive aspect of Dr. Navathe’s work is how he attacks core organizational challenges with scientific methods – yielding direct impact on patient care while simultaneously making seminal contributions to our scientific understanding of how to better design care and payment models. His scholarship targets the most pressing questions in care and payment model design, answers them with rigor in partnership with real-world organizations, and communicates them with impact.   Dr. Navathe’s experience spans academics, the private sector, and government service. He has past experience with large-scale government-led projects, having served as Medical Officer and Senior Program Manager for the $1B federal Comparative Effectiveness Research program. His thought leadership led to the founding of a disciplinary academic journal, Health Care: The Journal of Delivery Science and Innovation, serving as its Co-Editor-in-Chief, as well as Founding Director of the Foundation for Healthcare Innovation. His work on health care cost and quality improvement has been published in numerous leading journals, including Science, The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), Health Affairs, Health Services Research, Healthcare, and other leading academic journals. As a practicing physician, Dr. Navathe has an up-close view of the complexities of health care financing and the resulting hardships. For these reasons, Dr. Navathe is dedicated to transforming health care delivery for his patients, who provide him great inspiration. He hopes that his work will improve their lives and the lives of Americans nationwide.