BEA's Landefeld moderates panel on health accounts

Survey of Current Business, Feb, 2007

In January, BEA organized two sessions at the annual Allied Social Sciences Association meetings in Chicago. The sessions brought together academic experts and BEA researchers to discuss issues related to the development of national health accounts. Among the academic participants were Joseph Newhouse (Harvard University), who chairs a National Academies panel on national health accounts, and Dr. Allison Rosen (University of Michigan), who is working with David Cutler (Harvard University) to develop a prototype set of health accounts. Other participants included key researchers in the area of health economics: Ernst Berndt (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), David Meltzer (University of Chicago), and Jack Triplett (Brookings Institution).

During the sessions, BEA staff also presented their research on related issues. Michael Christian reported findings from his study that used data on treatment outcomes to measure the quality-adjusted output of hospitals. Two papers, one by Ana Aizcorbe and Nicole Nestoriak and another by Alan White and Jaison Abel (from Analysis Group, working under contract for BEA), focused on the use of treatment episodes constructed from health claims data as a means of measuring the cost of health care. BEA intends to publish selected papers from these sessions in a future issue of the SURVEY OF CURRENT BUSINESS.