Michael E. Chernew, Ph.D.

Michael E. Chernew, the Leonard D. Schaeffer Professor of Health Care Policy and the director of the Healthcare Markets and Regulation (HMR) Laboratory at Harvard Medical School, is serving in an advisory role as a senior visiting fellow at The MITRE Corporation. He brings vast knowledge of healthcare economics and policy to MITRE’s work to modernize the healthcare industry.

The broad scope of Chernew’s health policy research includes approaches to controlling healthcare spending growth without sacrificing quality of care; value-based insurance design, which aligns patient cost sharing to clinical value; and population-based and episode-based payment models.

Chernew received the John D. Thompson Prize for Young Investigators from the Association of University Programs in Public Health, as well as the Alice S. Hersh Young Investigator Award from the Association of Health Services Research. Both recognized his overall contributions to health sciences research.

He is a member of the Congressional Budget Office’s panel of Health Advisors, and of the Institute of Medicine’s Committee on National Statistics. He is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. In addition, Chernew was elected to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences and served on the Institute’s Committee on Determination of Essential Health Benefits. In 2015, Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker appointed him to the Massachusetts Health Connector Board of Directors.

He is the former vice chair of the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, an independent agency that advises Congress on issues affecting the Medicare program. He also advised the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services on assumptions that actuaries were using to assess the financial status of the Medicare trust funds. Chernew reviewed the methodology used to project trends in long-term healthcare spending growth.

Chernew holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in economics from the University of Pennsylvania and a doctorate in economics from Stanford University.