...total cost of healthcare is too much, every dollar spent within healthcare is some healthcare provider’s revenue. And we’ve seen just an incredibly painful year for many of our customers...
The current narrative around the U.S. labor market is a mixed bag. On the one hand, many companies are struggling to find enough workers to return to a semblance of normal operations. On the other, 8 million fewer Americans were employed in April 2021 as compared to February 2020. We asked three experts from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill — Christian Lundblad, Director of Research, Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise and Richard "Dick" Levin Distinguished Professor of Finance, Area Chair of Finance and Associate Dean of the Ph.D. program, Kenan-Flagler Business School; Luca Flabbi, Associate Professor of Economics; and Paige Ouimet, Professor of Finance, Kenan-Flagler Business School — to weigh in on the critical issues behind this dichotomy.
2020 brought an end to North Carolina’s decade-long economic expansion that began in 2010 after the Great Recession. It has now been a year since COVID-19 arrived on U.S. shores, and we can see some changes clearly, while others are just starting to emerge from the haze. It will likely be years before we fully grasp the myriad ways COVID-19 has affected the nation’s and the state’s economies. Now seems like a good time to take stock of the fallout from 2020, the trends we’re seeing a year into the crisis and where things are starting to turn around for North Carolina.
In this paper, we study the problem of allocating inventory procured using donor funding to patients in different health states over a finite horizon with the objective of minimizing the number of disease‐adjusted life periods lost.
Crowdsourcing contests (also called innovation challenges, innovation contests, and inducement prize contests) can be used to solicit multisectoral feedback on health programs and design public health campaigns. They consist of organizing a steering committee, soliciting contributions, engaging the community, judging contributions, recognizing a subset of contributors, and sharing with the community.
In most sectors of the economy, competition is regarded as the way to improve quality and efficiency, lower costs, and increase innovations. Whether competition effectively achieves these improvements in health care, particularly with respect to hospital services, which remains the largest sector of spending for health care, is open to debate. Also debated, at least among some physicians, is whether functionally banning new physician-owned hospitals by prohibiting their participation in Medicare under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was too blunt an instrument to correct a problem that could have been fixed with a more nuanced regulatory solution, needlessly limiting a potential source of competition for hospital services.
Governors across the United States have reacted to the COVID-19 pandemic by implementing state-level executive actions to address a range of issues provoked by the crisis. Although it is too early to gauge the long-term effects of the pandemic and states’ responses to it, this Kenan Insight provides a preliminary analysis of actions governors have taken thus far, to help inform policymaking going forward.
For more than a year, researchers across the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s (UNC) Kenan-Flagler Business School (KFBS) and School of Medicine (SOM) worked with Sharecare, Inc. (Sharecare) to establish a framework for measuring the true value of corporate well-being interventions and develop a measurement tool to quantify their impact over time. The goal of the research was to assess the value of implementing corporate well-being interventions to improve employee health and lower direct medical costs to employers.
There is growing evidence that many multinational corporations are lowering their tax obligations by engaging in income shifting—moving income from high-tax countries to low-tax countries or tax havens, and shifting deductions from low-tax countries to high-tax countries. By at least one estimate, the result is loss of nearly $100 to $240 billion annually in global tax revenues. In this Kenan Insight, we explore the extent of the problem and what might be done to address it.
A pooled Public Use Microdata Sample File of the Census Bureau’s Annual American Community Survey (2011-2015) is used to (1) create a demographic profile of the nation’s older adult population; (2) develop an older adult household typology which encapsulates both generational dynamics and diverse living arrangements; and (3) identify older adults who face the greatest barriers to aging in place. Policies and strategies that support and facilitate successful aging in place for the most vulnerable older adults are discussed.
A panel of experts convened by UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School, its affiliated Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise and the Institute of African American Research will offer a press briefing via webinar on the intersection of the COVID-19 crisis and the Black Lives Matter movement—providing a framework for developing solutions to achieve equitable public health and economic outcomes for the short- and long-term.
The arrival of two approved COVID-19 vaccines provides a clear path to the end of the pandemic that held most of 2020 hostage. But a recent resurgence of the virus and skyrocketing rates of infection indicate that a full return to normalcy—including the pre-pandemic work environment— is still months in the future. In this Kenan Insight, we examine the relevant factors that will determine when and how we go back to the office.
On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic. Within two months, nearly half a million people fled hard-hit New York City. Will they return once the crisis has passed? In this Kenan Insight, we explore how the ongoing pandemic is raising questions about the future attractiveness of large cities as places to live and do business.
In this discussion, I use Holzhacker, Krishnan, and Mahlendorf (this issue), hereafter HKM, as a point of departure from which to discuss the current state of the two research areas to which they contribute. I will present some big-picture thoughts on research opportunities in their source literatures — the literature on financial management in health care and the literature on cost stickiness — and speculate as to where these literatures might go in the future.
Bradley Staats, UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School professor of operations and faculty director of the institute-affiliated Center for the Business of Health, spoke to The Well about Amazon’s next move in health care. The online retail giant announced in July that it was acquiring primary care provider One Medical and will now shut down its Amazon Care telehealth service. Staats and co-author Robert S. Huckman recently wrote in Harvard Business Review about three key components to Amazon’s playbook for entering new businesses.
Join the Center for the Business of Health for the 12th annual UNC Business of Healthcare Conference, "The Role of Innovation in Value-Based Health" on Friday, Nov. 4, 2022 at UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School.