Spotlighting: Tamara Konetzka

Dr. Konetzka conducts research in health economics, aging and long-term care, quality of care, hospital markets, workforce issues, and Medicare and Medicaid policy, focusing on the relationship between economic incentives and quality of care. She holds a Ph.D. in health economics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a master’s in economics from the University of Pennsylvania, where she also completed a post-doctoral fellowship. She has been on the faculty of the Department of Health Studies at the University of Chicago since 2004. An important body of work stemming from her dissertation examines spillover effects between Medicaid and Medicare policies in nursing homes. Forthcoming publications include a causal analysis of the nursing home staffing-outcomes relationship in Health Services Research, an assessment of the appropriateness of mandated hospital minimum staffing ratios in Medical Care, and an analysis showing the diminished ability of managed care to control hospital costs in Inquiry.

Dr. Konetzka’s current work generally involves econometric analysis of large data sets and focuses largely on incentives faced by nursing homes to provide care of sufficient or high quality. One phenomenon that policy makers as well as nursing home providers and consumers have to consider is the rising rate of malpractice litigation in nursing homes. One of Dr. Konetzka’s research projects examines the links between malpractice litigation and quality of care, i.e. whether the threat of litigation acts as a deterrent to poor quality. This work was funded in part through CHAS pilot funds and will be presented at the meetings of the American Economic Association in January 2008. Another stream of long-term-care work involves evaluation of the impact of public reporting of quality on nursing home quality, including unintended consequences. In the hospital sector, she is studying how the profitability of different conditions affects the quality of care for those conditions when hospitals face financial stress.

Earlier in her career, Dr. Konetzka was a research director for a large nursing home association in Washington D.C., where she conducted impact assessments on regulatory issues affecting institutional long-term care, managed research on the development of quality indicators across long-term care settings, and conducted large, national surveys of the assisted living industry.  She teaches courses in aging and health policy and health services research methods.

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