Featured Researcher: David C. Chan
David C. Chan, a tenured associate professor of health policy at Stanford University and a research associate in the NBER’s Economics of Health program, was awarded the 2023 American Society of Health Economists Medal for the early-career economist who has made the most significant contributions to health economics.
Among those contributions are studies finding that emergency room doctors are more likely to order quick, high-cost tests at the end of their shifts, that healthcare costs are higher and emergency room patients fare worse when treated by nurse practitioners rather than physicians, and that veterans transported by ambulance to US Veterans Administration (VA) hospitals have higher survival rates than those taken to non-VA hospitals.
Drawing on labor and organizational economics, Chan studies how information is used in healthcare, how this affects productivity, and the implications for design. One of his recent projects studied the effect of local reimbursement rules on Medicare utilization, costs, and patient outcomes. Another investigated the determinants of COVID-19 vaccine take-up among US veterans.
Chan is a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. For more than a decade, Chan has been an investigator in the VA Center for Health Care Evaluation and since 2022 he has been codirector of the Center for Policy Evaluation in the VA’s Quality Enhancement Research Initiative.
Chan earned his bachelor’s degree in mathematics and economics from the University of California, Riverside; master’s degrees in international health policy from the London School of Economics and Political Science and in the economics of development from the University of Oxford; an MD from the University of California, Los Angeles; and a PhD in economics from MIT.
He joined the Stanford faculty as an assistant professor of medicine following staff physician positions at three Boston-area hospitals: Brigham and Women’s, McLean, and the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. He is currently a staff physician in the Palo Alto Veterans Affairs Health Care System. In 2011–12, he was an entrepreneur in residence in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and a fellow at two US Food and Drug Administration centers, one focusing on Drug Evaluation and Research, the other on Devices and Radiological Health.
