My research has primarily focused on how technology adoption impacts productivity, innovation, and commercialization, with a particular focus on the healthcare sector.
While IT can effectively automate labor in repetitive, relatively low-skilled tasks, whether and how IT alters skill-intensive tasks is less clear despite the expanding role of IT in high-skill domains. This paper attempts to bridge this gap by studying the implementation of IT in a non-routine, skill-intensive setting, the provision of intensive medical care by doctors, and asks whether IT is outcomes-enhancing and induces workers to shift effort across tasks. Using data from a large hospital network, I estimate the effects of a network-wide telemedical intervention in which in-person critical care physicians are almost entirely replaced by software algorithms and remote treatment.
IT and Productivity: Evidence from Telemedicine
(with Noam Kirson, Elyse Swallow, Jessica Lu, Brahim Bookhart, Jess DeMartino, Josie Maynard, Yashna Shivdasani, Dody Eid, and Patrick Lefebvre, published at Public Health)
Minority populations in the United States face a disproportionate burden of illness from COVID-19 infection and have lower vaccination rates compared with other groups. Using observational, real world evidence, this study estimated the equity implications of increased COVID-19 vaccination in the United States, with a focus on the number of cases, hospitalizations, and deaths avoided.
Increasing COVID-19 vaccination in the United States: projected impact on cases, hospitalizations, and deaths by age and racial group
(with Mark Butler, Stefani D’Angelo, Melissa Kaplan, Zarrin Tashnim, Danielle Miller, Heejoon Ahn, Louise Falzon, Andrew J. Dominello, Thevaa Chandereng, Ken Cheung, and Karina Davidson, published at The Harvard Data Science Review)
As part of a special edition introducing personalized (n-of-1) methods to data science, this paper seeks to test the viability of deploying personalized techniques in clinical practice. Using chronic lower back pain as a setting, this study determined participants’ ratings of usability and satisfaction with the virtual, personalized intervention delivery system and, in the long term, identified ways to integrate these personalized trials into patient care.
A Series of Virtual Interventions for Chronic Lower Back Pain: A Feasibility Pilot Study for a Series of Personalized (N-of-1) Trials
(with Amitabh Chandra and Lauren Mostrom, chapter in The Role of Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Economic Growth, National Bureau of Economic Research
We provide a detailed picture of early-stage innovation in healthcare as measured by the investment decisions of venture capitalists (VCs), whose investment decisions profoundly shape the quality of patient care. We find enormous geographic concentration of healthcare deals which motivates us to explore the ‘valley of death’ hypothesis (the idea that many useful inventions are not explored because VCs may not know about them), and find preliminary support for this hypothesis.
Venture Capital-Led Entrepreneurship in Health Care
(with Ariel D. Stern)
This paper asks whether the large-scale technological change that is characteristic of an industry-wide digital transformation entrenches industry leaders or enables the rise of new entrants. We offer a novel approach to this question by studying the medical device industry, a unique setting in which we observe all new product commercialization over several years and in which the introduction of software has created fresh opportunities for new product development. Pioneering a new application of text analysis, we consider over 35,000 new medical devices that came to market in the United States from 2002 to 2016 and examine the relative importance of within-firm know-how, geography, and financial resources in predicting digital new product development.
Who Drives Digital Innovation: Evidence from the U.S. Medical Device Industry
(with Raj Choudhury and Barbara Larson, Published at Strategic Management Journal)
An emerging form of remote work allows employees to work from anywhere, allowing the employee to be physically detached from the office. While traditional “work-from-home (WFH)” programs offer the worker temporal flexibility, “work-from-anywhere (WFA)” programs offer both temporal and geographic flexibility. This paper studies the effects of WFA on productivity at the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and exploits a natural experiment leading to exogeneity in the timing of individual examiners’ transition to remote work.