Launched in 2023, The Parity Center is an interdisciplinary team of experts working to catalyze reform in health care payment in a way that promotes equitable health care delivery and outcomes. Founded by Amol Navathe, the Center is based in the Perelman School of Medicine’s Center for Health Incentives and Behavioral Economics (CHIBE).
Austin S. Kilaru, assistant professor of emergency medicine and deputy director of The Parity Center, describes the work he and his team have done in collaboration with health insurers, health systems, physician practices and policymakers. The Center’s main objectives are to investigate—and expose—the root causes of how payment policies create structural barriers to achieving health equity, and to evaluate the impact of payment reform on health disparities and use those insights to inform evidence-based policy design. Collaboration, says Kilaru, is a key part to the Center’s success.
“We have support from Arnold Ventures to define the health care safety-net in the United States, which will allow policymakers to target interventions that better support physicians, hospitals, and other providers who disproportionately care for historically marginalized populations,” Kilaru says.
“We believe that policies must be designed—or changed—using evidence that informs their impact on historically marginalized populations. There is real and meaningful momentum to improve the health care system using payment as the lever for change, ranging from new approaches to primary care reimbursement, Medicaid policy redesign, support for hospitals vulnerable to closure, and interventions to address health-related social needs. Yet, all these efforts need to be guided by data to be effective and also to avoid unintended consequences for the problems they hope to solve.”
Read more at the Center for Health Incentives and Behavioral Economics.
