Impact - Healthcare Management Initiative

15 April 2026 - Alumni Healthcare Club Annual Conference - Sorbonne Université, Paris.

The INSEAD Healthcare club invited senior leaders from healthcare, industry, and public policy to examine a critical question for the decade ahead: Can healthcare systems adapt to tomorrow’s medicine? As innovation accelerates, from AI to personalized therapies, are our funding models, regulatory frameworks, and hospital structures ready to keep up?

Find out more on https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7450551920878043136 

15 October 2025 - Optimal Staffing and Treatment for Collaborative Care of Diabetes and Depression - Jay Swaminathan, UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School

About 27% of patients with diabetes also suffer from depression, and the presence of co-morbid depression could increase the cost of care for diabetes by up to 100%. Several randomized clinical trials have demonstrated that physical and mental health are more likely to improve for diabetes patients suffering from depression when regular treatment for depression is provided in a primary care setting (called Collaborative Care). However, Collaborative Care requires additional resource utilization costs and a separate reimbursement model. When managing Collaborative Care, clinics must balance patient health outcomes with the program’s financial sustainability. Important  operational levers in Collaborative Care are allocating care managers’ time to patients based on their requirements and the care managers’ staffing level. This staffing and workload allocation influences the revenue, costs, and patient health outcomes. We present a novel Markov Dynamic Programming model that, unlike existing approaches, jointly optimizes both staffing levels and treatment policies for Collaborative Care programs and quantifies the costs and benefits of collaborative care. Mathematically, we model Collaborative Care management at the clinical level as an infinite-horizon Markov Dynamic Program. The objective is a weighted sum of total patient QALYs and the clinic profits. The model incorporates insurance payment, resource utilization costs, and disease progression of co-morbid diabetes and depression. We derive structural properties for the joint optimization of the staffing level and allocating care managers’ time to different patient categories. Using these structural properties, we develop a practical and easy-to-implement policy for staffing level and care managers’ time allocation that performs close to the optimal solution. We calibrate the model with data from a large academic medical center and show that our solutions can improve total QALYs and clinic profits compared to current practices. Our analysis also reveals key insights into payment models’ effects on Collaborative Care. Profit under the fixed-fee model responds non-monotonically to payment rate increases, highlighting complex financial dynamics. Fixed-fee models show a threshold behaviour, with high-intensity treatments becoming optimal only above certain payment rates. This threshold varies based on the profit-QALY weight balance, and this threshold is lower under joint-optimization than treatment-only optimization.

24 September 2025 - Contracting Telemedicine: A game-theoretic consideration for NHS Advice & Guidance - Feryal Erhun, Cambridge Judge Business School

The UK's National Health Service (NHS) relies on general practitioners (GPs) as the first point of contact for patients for initial assessment and treatment. However, this gatekeeping in the referral process may be susceptible to diagnostic and referral errors, causing both over- and under-referrals. These inefficiencies, compounded by long outpatient waiting lists, strain traditional care models. To address such inefficiencies, the NHS introduced Advice & Guidance (A&G), a telemedicine service allowing GPs to consult hospital specialists electronically before making referral decisions. This optional pre-referral step aims to improve referral appropriateness and reduce unnecessary hospital visits. We investigate optimal incentive mechanisms to maximize the effectiveness of A&G in addressing referral inefficiencies. We develop a game-theoretic model to analyze the deployment of the A&G service under different contractual schemes involving three key stakeholders: the payer (service purchaser), the hospital (service provider), and the GPs (service users). Our analysis reveals the limitations of existing approaches, such as a hospital's voluntary participation, fee-for-service, and two-part tariffs in achieving system-wide efficiency. To overcome these shortcomings, we propose a novel COst-sharing PErformance-based (COPE) contract that aligns incentives between the payer and the hospital to reach socially optimal outcomes. We extend this contract to a dynamic, multi-period setting by incorporating GP learning, and propose Dynamic COPE contracts to support sustained coordination over time.

12 June 2025 - Annual Healthcare Conference - Paris 

The INSEAD Healthcare Club hosted its Annual Healthcare Conference, where leading experts from across the healthcare ecosystem shared their insights on the next horizon for our healthcare systems — and what avenues should be considered to address the significant challenges our systems are facing.

28 May 2025 - Challenges in supply, market competition, and regulation of infant formula in the United States - Ravi Anupindi, University of Michigan

Infant formula is the primary or supplementary source of nutrition for many infants in the US. Consequently, disruptions to the supply of infant formula can have a severe impact on infants’ health and well-being. In late 2021 and early 2022, a recall of specific infant formula products, followed by a pause in production, resulted in a widespread, national shortage. As part of the HR 2617 of the FY2023 Omnibus Bill, Congress directed FDA to enter an agreement with the National Academies (NASEM) to study the challenges in supply, market competition, and regulation of infant formula in the United States.
The resulting NASEM consensus study report, released on July 25, 2024, explains policy and marketplace vulnerabilities that were exposed during the shortage, describes the extent to which actions taken by relevant stakeholders addressed these vulnerabilities, identifies remaining gaps in the system, and recommends actions to reduce the risk and lessen the effect of any future disruption to the infant formula supply chain.

17-19 February 2025 - Global Mental Health in Asia Symposium - Singapore 

Mental health issues are increasingly recognised as a critical component of overall health. However, in many parts of Asia, mental health awareness, support, and resources remain limited. By bridging these gaps, we can make a profound impact on individuals, families, and communities.

At GMH Asia 2025, we will focus on addressing the main mental health priorities for Asia, examining prevailing needs and identifying gaps in mental health services, exploring barriers and implementation challenges and exchanging best practices and key recommendations to collectively advance mental health.