Sunita Desai

Sunita Desai, PhD is a health economist in the Department of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School. Her research spans diverse topics including consumer behavior in health care, health information technology, and specialty pharmaceuticals. In her work on consumerism in health care, she is leading several evaluations of large-scale price transparency implementations. These studies explore how patients search for and use price information as well as the impact of price transparency on health care prices, provider choice, and spending. In another set of projects, she studies price variation in health care to gain insight into geographic areas and health care services with greatest potential savings from price shopping (without sacrificing quality of care). In other work, she has also studied provider incentives to avoid adopting interoperable electronic medical records systems in an anticompetitive attempt to keep patients “locked in”.