Paula Chatterjee, MD, MPH, LDI Senior Fellow and Assistant Professor at the Perelman School of Medicine, has received the Society of General Internal Medicine’s (SGIM) 2023 Best Published Research Paper of the Year Award. The award was presented on May 13 at the SGIM Annual Meeting in Aurora, Colorado.

Paula Chatterjee

The honored paper, “Variation and Changes in the Targeting of Medicaid Disproportionate Share Hospital Payments,” was published in Health Affairs in December 2022. It was a study of the Medicaid Disproportionate Share Hospital (DSH) payments program designed to offset safety net hospitals’ uncompensated care costs. Looking at 49 states, it found that 31.6% of all payments went to hospitals that did not meet statutorily supported definitions to qualify for those payments.

“Significant Contributions”

A U.S. professional society whose 3,300 members are engaged in internal medicine research and teaching, SGIM publishes the Journal of General Internal Medicine. Its annual Best Published Research Paper Award is designed to recognize works that have made “significant contributions to generalist research.”

Chatterjee is Director of Health Equity Research at Penn’s Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics (LDI) and practices inpatient medicine at Penn Presbyterian Medical Center. In 2021, she received the SGIM Milton W. Hamolsky Junior Faculty Scientific Presentation Award for an outstanding abstract.

Her recent research projects have focused on understanding the relationship between hospital finances and quality of care in rural and urban safety-net hospitals, and on the allocation and impact of Medicaid DSH payments.

Chatterjee completed her residency in Internal Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. She holds an MD from Harvard Medical School, where she also earned an MPH in Chronic Disease Epidemiology.


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