Research Emphases

Trust: A big part of my portfolio at the moment focuses on trust in health care. I recently reviewed more than 700 papers from the past 50 years on the topic, resulting in lengthy synthesis forthcoming in Milbank Quarterly. I am the current AcademyHealth Trust Scholar in Residence, where I help to cultivate a national research community focused on researching trust in health care. I am also a guest editor for a special issue of the Hastings Center Report focused entirely on trust in health care and science, which should be available by summer 2023. I have several grants and manuscripts under review focused on trust, as well as public-facing blogs such as this and this.  

Organizational Ethics: Much of my current work is motivated by, or explicitly investigates, organizational ethics. My dissertation used empirical and normative methods to consider what, if anything, is ethically problematic about “dirty money” donated to nonprofits. One of the resulting papers became the cover story for the Spring 2022 edition of the Stanford Social Innovation Review. I was also part of a team at Harvard studying the potential for businesses to act as anchor institutions in local communities. I’ve more recently focused explicitly on hospitals. A 2021 paper in Pediatrics explored whether health systems should proactively facilitate racially-concordant care on behalf of Black patients. A 2022 paper in Hastings Center Report explored whether hospitals have legitimate responsibilities beyond the delivery of health care. 

Currently, I’m in exploring the role of public (county and municipal) hospitals in the US healthcare delivery landscape. Read more about the Public Hospitals Project here.

Social Determinants: Much of my research has been focused on the effectiveness and management of social determinant of health investments. I co-authored The American Health Care Paradox in 2013 with Elizabeth Bradley and subsequently developed an economic model (CAPGI) for financing social determinants of health at the community level with Len Nichols, which we published in Health Affairs. CAPGI has been used to finance investments in home-delivered meals, behavioral health crisis response teams and COVID-19 vaccine education and outreach. Len and I are currently working on a series of papers describing what we have learned about inter-organizational collaboration and financing over the past 5 years.