Jalpa A. Doshi, PhD, is the Leon Hess Professor of Internal Medicine at the Perelman School of Medicine. She is also Director of Value Based Insurance Design Initiatives at the Center for Health Incentives and Behavioral Economics and Director of the Economic Evaluations Unit of the Center for Evidence-Based Practice at Penn. The goal of her research program is to understand how pharmaceuticals can be better accessed and utilized in the health care system to improve health care outcomes while balancing costs. Her research focuses on three broad areas: 1) impact of prescription benefit design and reimbursement policies on access to prescription drugs and the quality and cost of health care; 2) prevalence, causes, outcomes, and costs of suboptimal medication use in chronic diseases and the clinical and economic impact of innovative behavioral or policy interventions for improving medication adherence and management; and 3) advancing the methods used in pharmaceutical outcomes and cost-effectiveness research to enhance its usefulness in real world decision making by patients, providers, payers, and policymakers. In recent years, her research program in all three areas has focused on specialty drugs and biologics.
She has co-authored Economic Evaluation in Clinical Trials (Oxford University Press). Her research has received widespread attention from the media including the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Notably, her work has contributed directly to changes in policies of private insurers and government programs. For example, her team was the first to produce rigorous empirical research and recommend the institution of an annual out-of-pocket cost maximum combined with “smoothing” under Medicare Part D, which was recently incorporated in the Inflation Reduction Act. She currently serves as Associate Editor of Health Economics. She holds a PhD in Pharmaceutical Health Services Research from the University of Maryland.
