This seminar will take place on June 15 at 15:30. The seminar will be in a hybrid format with:
- in-person session in the IST Alameda Campus, Department of Engineering and Management's Meeting Room
- online, via Zoom https://zoom.us/j/99890567303?pwd=QtXl2yvP9a2tyqNBMvqvp4mdk1bLA5.1
Our seminars are free to attend and open to everyone. Please share with whomever may be interested.
Summary
Whether new medical technology broadens access or concentrates gains is central to health policy. We study the staggered adoption of pulsed-field ablation (PFA), a faster cardiac-ablation technology approved in late 2023, across hospitals in a large US healthcare market. Exploiting within-physician variation among electrophysiologists practicing at multiple hospitals, we find PFA availability raises a physician's ablation volume by 27% and her ablation procedure-mix share by 4.5 percentage points, with no offsetting decline in other procedures. These gains are sharply concentrated. On the supply side, the entire effect accrues to high-volume specialist physicians, with low-volume physicians showing no response. On the demand side, the additional procedures accrue to Medicare and commercially insured patients, while Medicaid and uninsured volumes are unchanged. We find that new medical technology concentrates productivity gains among already-skilled physicians and already-insured patients, widening disparities on both sides of the market.
Speaker's bio
Revathy Surya Narayana is an Assistant Professor of Health Economics, Systems, and Policy at the O'Donnell School of Public Health, UT Southwestern Medical Center. As an applied microeconomist, Dr. Surya Narayana's research spans issues related to health economics, labor markets, and the criminal justice system, with a strong emphasis on risky health behaviors. She has substantial experience working with complex administrative datasets, applying causal inference methods, and designing experiments to explore key questions about social welfare and health policy. She received her PhD from the Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy at Cornell University.
Personal homepage: https://revathy-suryanarayana.github.io/