David A. Asch, MD, MBA
Senior Vice President for Strategic Initiatives at the University of Pennsylvania
John Morgan Professor of Medicine, Professor of Health Care Management, and Professor of Operations, Information and Decisions at Wharton
Member of CHIBE’s Internal Advisory Board
Biography
David Asch is Senior Vice President for Strategic Initiatives at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is the John Morgan Professor of Medicine and Professor of Health Care Management and Professor of Operations, Information and Decisions at the Wharton School.
His research aims to improve how physicians and patients make medical choices, including the adoption of new pharmaceuticals or medical technologies, the purchase of insurance, and personal health behaviors. His research combines elements of economic analysis with psychological theory and consumer marketing in the field now called behavioral economics. He is the author of more than 500 published papers and has won numerous national awards for teaching, scholarship, and mentorship. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine.
He created and from 2001 to 2012 directed the Center for Health Equity Research and Promotion—the Department of Veterans Affairs’ national center to support vulnerable populations and reduce racial disparities. From 1998 to 2012 he was Executive Director of the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics. During that time the institute’s external funding increased from $7 million annually to $125 million annually, making it one of the largest university-based health policy research organization in the world. During the same period, the institute created new dissemination and media programs to increase the impact and relevance of health policy scholarship and new degree programs, new executive education programs, and new pipeline programs to advance the careers and contributions of underrepresented minority trainees.
From 2012 to 2022 he was Executive Director of the Center for Health Care Innovation at Penn Medicine, a 6-hospital system with nearly 3,000 beds and over 7,000 physicians—leading a team of nearly 100 designers, clinicians, developers, and data scientists. Defining projects include transforming approaches to primary care and specialty services, new approaches to managing digital information flows for better clinical care and reduced clinician burden, the development of information technology platforms to better engage patients and their families in the management of acute and chronic disease, and programs to advance health equity.
Some of these innovations and the processes used to support them have been documented in articles published in The New England Journal of Medicine, including: “What business are we in?” “Automated hovering in health care,” “Are we in a medical education bubble market?,” “Insourcing health care innovation,” “Innovation as discipline, not fad,” “Asymmetric thinking about return on investment,” “Engineering social incentives for health,” “Subscribing to your patients—reimagining the future of electronic health records,” “The cost, price, and debt of medical education,“ “Toward facilitated self-service in health care,” “Bridging polarization in medicine—from biology to social causes.”
From 2022-2023 he served as Senior Vice Dean for Strategic Initiatives at the Perelman School of Medicine leading strategic planning for the school and for the University of Pennsylvania Health System, producing the guiding framework, Serving a Changing World.
He is founding partner of the behavioral economics consulting firm, VAL Health.
Find his TEDMED talk here: Why it’s so hard to make healthy decisions
He received his bachelor’s degree from Harvard University, his MD from Weill-Cornell Medical College, and his MBA from the Wharton School. He was a resident in Internal Medicine and a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania.