Urgent Matters

Dr. Barnett’s research focuses on health care delivery and quality, with a special interest in the delivery of specialty care and evaluating innovations in care delivery. Using tools from network science, his work has shown that hospitals whose patients see a larger number of doctors have higher costs and intensity of care at the end of life. He has also studied patterns of specialty referrals through the US and found that referral rates nearly doubled from 1999-2009. Dr. Barnett’s more recent projects have examined how risk adjustment for socioeconomic and clinical factors influences measurement of readmission rates, and how physician factors affect the delivery of low-value care such as overuse of antibiotics and opiates.   Read the NEJM paper here.