The economics of chance: what random events reveal about forces shaping health
LSEHoughton Street
Thu 26 Nov · 18:30 · Free
About this event
Chance occurrences affect our lives all the time, but sometimes they can teach us about what works and doesn't work in health care. In this lecture, Anupam B. Jena uses natural experiments - real-world events that create study-like conditions outside the laboratory - to examine the hidden forces shaping health care. A practising physician and PhD economist at Harvard Medical School, Jena has spent his career asking questions that randomised controlled trials cannot answer, exploring how physician behaviour, workforce dynamics, and structural features of health systems influence spending, quality, and patient outcomes. His work, published in the New England Journal of Medicine and JAMA and brought to wider audiences through his Freakonomics, MD podcast and national bestselling book, Random Acts of Medicine , reveals patterns in clinical behaviour that are both under-appreciated and consequential for policy, with implications for how we evaluate and design health systems.
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