Bio: As a management consultant in the health care practice of PwC Strategy& (formerly Booz & Co) in Amsterdam, Ikram has worked with Dutch hospitals on strategies to reduce unnecessary care while improving quality of care. Ikram has used innovative care delivery models and digital health tools to redesign chronic care, and has also helped hospitals with financial turnaround. Ikram has worked as a physician in the Netherlands, Pakistan, and Namibia. He co-founded an eye care project for villagers in Pakistan and an initiative to combat childhood obesity in low-income neighborhoods in Amsterdam. Ikram received his M.D. (cum laude) from the University of Amsterdam and his M.P.H. from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. His Ph.D. in Public Health is from the University of Amsterdam, with his research focusing on the social determinants of ethnic minority health. While working on his Ph.D., Ikram contributed to a WHO report on the social determinants of health and human rights and wrote a report on refugee mental health for the Health Council of the Netherlands. He was awarded the Public Health Award for the best Ph.D. thesis in 2016.
Placement: Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
Mentors: Meredith Rosenthal, Ph.D., C. Boyden Gray Professor of Health Economics and Policy, Department of Health Policy and Management, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health; Thomas Feeley, M.D., Senior Fellow, Harvard Business School
Project: Increasing Value for High-Need, High-Cost Patients through Care Coordination: Drawing Lessons from Best-Performing ACOs
Description: High-need, high-cost (HNHC) patients disproportionally increase health care spending in high-income countries. Some of this spending is preventable, by coordinating care among different providers. Value-based purchasing models promote care coordination, as they address misaligned financial incentives and fragmented health care delivery. Early evidence suggests that Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs), a federal value-based purchasing model in the U.S., have a modest impact on spending on HNHC patients. However, the mechanisms by which ACOs reorganize care and improve care coordination for HNHC patients remain unknown.
This research aims to qualitatively study the best-performing ACOs in order to understand what these organizations do to deliver higher-value care for HNHC patients. High-performing ACOs will be selected using quantitative and qualitative criteria and expert interviews. Then, through in-depth interviews and site visits, those ACOs will be studied for such qualities as organizational redesign, specific care programs for HNHC patients, leadership and organizational culture, and remuneration scheme. The study results should offer lessons for countries looking to deal with HNHC patients by employing innovative care models, and for countries that are experimenting with value-based purchasing models, including the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.