Resoundingly Human: Working smarter, not harder, to improve healthcare transparency

Healthcare is a complex, often overwhelming subject, and the effort to match patients with providers based on patient needs and provider ability, known as the patient provider alignment (or PPA) problem, has consistently proven difficult to tackle. In the past, this was thought to have been exacerbated by the limited availability of information available to the public regarding providers and their performance, which could help facilitate better patient provider matches. However, despite efforts to increase transparency by making healthcare data open and available to the public, the PPA problem still persists.  In this episode, I am joined by Soroush Saghafian professor with Harvard University, whose research in the INFORMS journal Operations Research, “Can public reporting cure healthcare? The role of quality transparency in improving patient-provider alignment,” takes a deep dive into exploring this issue and offering some potential solutions.