Bruce E. Landon

Bruce E. Landon, MD, MBA, MSc, is a professor of health care policy at Harvard Medical School and an associate professor of medicine at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. He practices internal medicine at BIDMC.

Dr. Landon’s primary research interest has been assessing the impact of different characteristics of physicians and health care organizations, ranging from health plans to physician group practices, on physician behavior and the provision of health care services. His work in this area has included the development of a theoretical model to explain how health care organizations affect the quality of care and he is now involved in several projects that will help describe and quantify the impact of a variety of organizational characteristics and strategies, including quality improvement strategies and financial incentives, on the provision of care. Dr Landon currently serves as the Principal Investigator of an RO1 from the National Institutes of Aging that studying the impact of physician financial incentives and other practice-related characteristics on the costs and intensity of care for Medicare Beneficiaries. In previous related work, he examined the impact of organizational and market characteristics on physician decision making and career satisfaction. Dr. Landon is also a Project Leader on an NIA-funded program-project grant that seeks to examine the influence of informal physician social networks on local practice patterns and the diffusion of new technologies.

Dr. Landon has also been particularly interested in studying organizational approaches to improving the quality of care. He recently completed a national evaluation of the HRSA Health Disparities Collaboratives, the primary quality improvement activity for our nation’s Community Health Centers. The study was funded by the Agency for Health Care Research and Quality, the Health Resources Services Administration (HRSA), and the Commonwealth Fund. In this nationally representative study, he found that the collaboratives improved the processes of care for chronic medical conditions, but not the outcomes. Dr. Landon has also been interested in larger organizational entities, such as managed care health plans and has studied quality of care and patient experiences in Medicare’s managed care program. He is co-leading a new study comparing the quality of care for Medicare beneficiaries in private health plans and in traditional Medicare. In an earlier study of over 400,000 Medicare Beneficiaries, he found that those in private health plans rated their care lower than those in traditional Medicare, but were more likely to receive recommended preventive care. He has also extensively studied the experiences of state Medicaid agencies with managed care and compared the quality within Medicaid managed care and private managed care plans. Finally, Dr. Landon has also developed a research program with vascular surgeons to study the comparative effectiveness of treatment strategies for vascular disease.

Dr. Landon graduated summa cum laude from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania with a major in finance. He received his MD degree from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, and an MBA with a concentration in health care management from the Wharton School. He also received an MSc in health policy and management from the Harvard School of Public Health. Dr. Landon is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians and an elected member of the American Society of Clinical Investigation.