Ashish Jha, M.D., M.P.H.

 Ashish Jha, M.D., M.P.H., is assistant professor of health policy and management at the Harvard School of Public Health. He is also assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and a staff physician at the Boston VA and Brigham and Women's Hospitals. Dr. Jha's research interests include quality of care-particularly in hospitals that serve large minority populations-health care disparities, and the use of health information technology (HIT) and its impact on health care quality, safety, and efficiency.

Dr. Jha received his M.D. from Harvard Medical School and trained in internal medicine at the University of California, San Francisco where he also served as chief resident. He completed his general medicine fellowship training from Brigham and Women's Hospital and received his M.P.H. from the Harvard School of Public Health. He joined the faculty at Harvard in July 2004. In June 2008, Dr. Jha was the recipient of AcademyHealth's Alice S. Hersh New Investigator Award, which recognizes scholars early in their careers as health services researchers who show exceptional promise for future contributions.

Currently, Dr. Jha is the principal investigator on a HCFO grant investigating the impact of pay for performance (P4P) on hospitals that care for minorities and the poor. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) have implemented P4P demonstrations, and are considering implementing P4P nationally. However, the impact of P4P has not been widely evaluated. Hospitals that care for underserved populations may have greater potential for quality improvement, but conversely these facilities lack the tools and resources to improve quality and compete for the additional resources. With this grant, Dr. Jha will examine the impact of financial incentives to improve quality on hospitals that care for poor or other underserved populations, by looking at changes in quality for hospitals in the Medicare Premier P4P Demonstration that serve disadvantaged populations. "It is our hope that this research will provide insights about the impact of P4P on hospitals that serve disadvantaged populations, and help policymakers to design incentive systems that encourage higher quality care for all without disproportionately harming hospitals that care for these populations," says Dr. Jha. For more information about this study, please visit grants/impact-pay-performance-hospitals-care-minorities-and-poor.

For more information on Dr. Jha and a list of select publications, please visit www.hsph.harvard.edu/faculty/ashish-jha/.