Placement: Harvard Medical School
Mentor: Thomas McGuire, Ph.D. (Professor of Health Economics, Harvard Medical School)
Co-mentor: Timothy Layton, Ph.D. (Assistant Professor of Health Care Policy, Harvard Medical School)
Project: Social Return of Alternative Treatment Models for People with Serious Mental Illness
Joran Lokkerbol, Ph.D., M.Sc., is a 2017-18 Dutch Harkness/VWS Fellow in Health Care Policy and Practice. He currently serves as the Director of the Center of Economic Evaluation at the Netherlands Institute of Mental Health and Addiction and is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the University Medical Center Groningen. Lokkerbol’s research focuses on health system optimization and health economic evaluations of interventions targeting the treatment and prevention of mental disorders. He was recently awarded a prestigious Mental Healthcare Fellowship by the Netherlands Organization for Health Research and Development. Lokkerbol previously worked as a consultant at the Institute of Business and Industrial Statistics at the University of Amsterdam, where he supported professionals in healthcare and other service organizations in improving their processes using Lean Six Sigma methodology. He completed his Master’s degree in Econometrics at the University of Amsterdam and his Ph.D. in Mental Health Economics in the Department of Clinical Psychology at VU University Amsterdam.
Project Abstract: People with serious mental illness suffer substantial losses in quality of life and encounter major obstacles in role functioning. Having a serious mental illness, which often comes with comorbid somatic disorders, reduces life expectancy by 10 to 20 years. This, along with the high demands people with serious mental illness place on the healthcare system, underscores the importance of increasing our understanding of how services for this population should be organized to optimize their outcomes.
This study will assess the impact of different health care plans on the rate of avoidable hospitalizations and access to recommended preventive care for people with serious mental illness in the U.S. The impact of different service delivery models on health care usage, employment, and income-related outcomes for people with serious mental illness in the Netherlands will also be examined. Data on enrollment, plan choice and insurance claims for the New York State Medicaid population will be used, along with patient-level data from Statistics Netherlands. The results of the study will help determine how the organization of services translates to outcomes for people with serious mental illness, such that policymakers will be better informed on how to organize services for this high-need, high-cost population.