Andrew Ryan, Ph.D.

Andrew Ryan, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Public Health in the Division of Outcomes and Effectiveness Research at Weill Cornell Medical College. Dr. Ryan has a Ph.D. in Social Policy with a concentration in Health Policy from the Heller School of Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University. Dr. Ryan’s research focuses on pay-for-performance and public quality reporting, disparities, and health care policy analysis.  He won the 2009 AcademyHealth Dissertation Award for his dissertation, “The Design of Value Based Purchasing in Medicare: Theory and Empirical Evidence” and the John M. Eisenberg Article-of-the-Year in Health Services Research for “Has Pay-for-Performance Decreased Access for Minority Patients?”

Since March 2013, Dr. Ryan has been the principal investigator of a HCFO-funded study on the effect of the Medicare Hospital Value-based Purchasing (HVBP) program on quality of care during the program’s first year of implementation. The HVBP program aims to improve the quality of care provided to Medicare patients in acute-care hospitals. It does so by rewarding acute-care hospitals with incentive payments for the quality of care they provide. The HVBP program gradually reduces inpatient payments to hospitals by a small percentage each year (from 1 percent in 2013 up to 2 percent in 2017), but it provides a performance-based incentive to hospitals that allows them to recoup these cuts by meeting clinical standards and improving patient satisfaction. Dr. Ryan and his colleagues will compare how participating hospitals and non-participating hospitals performed on incentivized clinical process and patient experience measures, before and after the HVBP program. The goal of this project is to provide an early evaluation of the HVBP program that will assist policymakers in refining this strategy in the future.

Additional information about Dr. Ryan’s work is available here.