Bio: Katharina Janus, Ph.D., a 2006-07 Commonwealth Fund Harkness Fellow in Health Care Policy, is an assistant professor at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health. In addition, she is a research fellow and senior lecturer for health services research and management at Hannover Medical School (Department of Epidemiology, Social Medicine and Health System Research) since 2003 and a visiting scholar at the University of California at Berkeley (Center for Health Research) since 2005. From 2001-02 she worked as a research scientist for one of the largest multi-hospital systems in the U.S. The results of the large-scale market study on integrated delivery systems and managed care strategies she conducted in the San Francisco Bay Area set the basis for her Ph.D. in organizational theory and health care management. In her position at Hannover Medical School, she has worked on developing a proposal for legislation for the improvement of the delivery of palliative care in Lower-Saxony, on integrated care delivery structures and on incentive systems in health care delivery. Most recently, she was the principal investigator of an international comparative study of physician job satisfaction in cooperation with the Center for Health Research at UC Berkeley and the Department of Health Research & Policy at Stanford University. She is particularly interested in the effects of monetary and non-monetary incentives on quality of care, including the physician and the patient factor in the production process of health care delivery. Janus obtained a master's degree in business administration and economics from the Universities of Hamburg and Panthéon-Sorbonne Paris in 2000 and completed her Ph.D. at the Helmut-Schmidt-University in Hamburg in 2003.
Placement: Columbia University
Mentors: Sherry Glied, Ph.D.; David Blumenthal, M.D., M.P.P.; Lawrence Brown, Ph.D.
Project: Decision-Making Across Medical Specialties--Shedding Light On the Real Effects of Incentives At the Point-of-Care
Description: Janus' project shed light on how monetary and non-monetary incentives are perceived by physicians and their actual impact on decision-making, including how this differs across specialties and whether the incentives are for routine or non-routine services. She interviewed more than 40 physicians from different specialties (surgery, general internal medicine, anesthesiology and psychiatry) on their decision-making process.