Lawrence Casalino, M.D., Ph.D.

Lawrence Casalino, M.D., Ph.D., is an associate professor in the Department of Health Studies at the University of Chicago. Prior to moving to the University of Chicago, he worked for twenty years as a family physician in private practice in the San Francisco Bay Area. Dr. Casalino uses concepts from institutional and organizational sociology and institutional economics to study the organization of physician practice. His research focuses on the varying ways in which physician practices are structured and on variations in the processes physicians use to care for patients. Dr. Casalino is interested both in the effects of different forms of physician practice on the quality and cost of health care and in the ways that government policies and competitive strategies of health plans and large employers influence physicians' practice. These interests have led to a series of publications on medical groups, physician-hospital relations, the use of organized processes to improve the quality of care, antitrust policy and clinical integration, physician self-referral, potential unintended effects of quality measurement, pay for performance, and public reporting on overall quality and disparities in the delivery of health care. Recently, Dr. Casalino authored a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation synthesis on physician self-referral and physician-owned specialty facilities.

Dr. Casalino holds a B.A. in philosophy from Boston College, where he was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, an M.D. from the University of California, San Francisco, and an M.P.H. and Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. He was awarded a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Investigator Award in Health Policy Research to study public and private policies and the organization of physician practice. Dr. Casalino is the principal investigator on a HCFO-funded project studying costs and benefits of physician practices' interactions with health plans. Using a national survey of physicians and medical group administrators, Dr. Casalino and colleagues developed estimates of the time spent by physicians and their staff on specific types of interactions with health plans, such as obtaining prior authorization. They estimated the total time and dollar cost of these interactions for private physician practices nationally, and also developed estimates by type of interaction, type of staff, and size and specialty type of the practice. For more information on Dr. Casalino's study, please see grants/costs-and-benefits-physician-practices-interactions-health-plans.

For more information about Dr. Casalino, his research interests, or a list of his publications, please visit http://health.bsd.uchicago.edu/Member.aspx?PersonID=4 .