Abstract: There is widespread agreement that the US healthcare system wastes as much as 5% of GDP, yet little consensus on what care is actually unproductive. This partly arises because of the endogeneity of patient choice of treatment location. This paper uses the effective random assignment of patients to ambulance companies to generate comparisons across similar patients treated at different hospitals.

Hospitals that discharge patients to expensive skilled nursing facilities are raising costs and reducing care quality, write John Graves, assistant professor of health policy, and MIT researchers Joseph Doyle and Jonathan Gruber.

Davidson County is in the midst of an economic boom and, in many ways, a cultural renaissance, but the state's capital lags its neighbors in several important health factors, according to a county health rankings report featuring data from the Department's Melinda Buntin, Carrie Fry, and Robert Gambrel.  

Congratulations to Dr. Stephen W. Patrick, who has been awarded a Burroughs-Wellcome Fund Trainee Travel Award to attend the Translational Science 2015 Meeting April 16 – 18 in Washington, DC.   Well done!