Guy David, PhD pays attention to aspects of the health care system that are understudied, just emerging, or difficult to measure. His research on emergency medical services, home health care, primary care, specialty hospitals, and ambulatory surgery centers has yielded insights into how individuals, firms, and regulators interact across the continuum of care.

His research has shed new light on persistent questions in labor economics, industrial organization, and public finance. For instance, why do for-profit and nonprofit hospitals co-exist in the same markets, and do they act differently from one another? Do hospitals cross-subsidize unprofitable services with more profitable ones, and is that an efficient way of financing indigent care? Does physician ownership of surgery centers affect surgical practice? Does pharmaceutical advertising affects drug safety? What determines organizational forgetting in health care organizations? What are the determinants of disadoption of technology? And do longer shifts affect performance for EMTs?

Emerging phenomena and new organizational trends in health care delivery hold a special interest for Dr. David. He has explored the privatization of emergency medical services (EMS), and how local governments procure EMS. He has examined the underlying economic forces that contributed to specialization in hospital medicine and now influence where hospitalists work. He has analyzed whether recognition as a patient-centered medical home (PCMH) reduces emergency department visits, work for which he received the 2015 Health Services Research article-of-the-year award. He has extended that work to create new typologies of the PCMH model that are associated with clinical outcomes.

Upcoming work will evaluate recent regulation of nonprofits’ provision of uncompensated care, determine the impact of the stroke care regionalization policy on clinical and cost outcomes, measure the effect of home health nurse handoffs on re-hospitalizations, assess the effect of real time insurance claims analysis on population health, and explore the evolving trend toward retainer–based medicine.

Dr. David is a mentor and educator as well as a researcher. He directs the doctoral program in Health Care Management and Economics at Wharton, where he teaches undergraduate, MBA and PhD courses. He is Director of Education at Penn LDI, where he leads graduate and executive education programs, such as the new Physician Leadership Academy. He is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, an associate editor of the American Journal of Health Economics and co-editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Health Economics and Management. He received his BA and MA in Economics from Tel Aviv University, and his PhD in Business Economics from the University of Chicago.