Applying Economics Expertise to Healthcare Challenges
Ken Lee
September 2011
 |
Ken Lee has supported numerous information technology acquisition and modernization efforts at MITRE's Center for Enterprise Modernization. |
|
|
Ken Lee may no longer be the busiest man at MITRE, but until recently, he would have been a serious contender for that title. Lee, who completed his Ph.D. in economics at George Mason University in the spring, spent more than seven years pursuing his degree while also working full time.
As the chief architect for the Department of Health and Human Services program under MITRE's Center for Transforming Health (CTH), Lee says he "typically supports whatever our current strategic focus areas are." Currently, he's working on the health insurance exchange implementation for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), required under the Affordable Care Act.
The act establishes health insurance reforms that provide more healthcare choices, improve the quality of healthcare, and hold insurance companies more accountable. To help lower costs and expand insurance coverage, the Affordable Care Act will allow states to create competitive private health insurance markets, or "health insurance exchanges." These exchanges will allow individuals to compare healthcare plans in their state based on price and quality. The programs aim at benefitting people, not health insurance organizations.
This fall, Lee's work will concentrate on the new Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation, located in Baltimore. Also established by the Affordable Care Act, the center works to improve Medicare, Medicaid, and the Children's Health Insurance Program. "I'll be working there on-site, at least part time, and helping establish MITRE's engineering role in the new center. This will include defining a financial modeling capability for evaluating candidate payment models designed to reduce healthcare costs," he says.
From Engineer to Economist
Lee came to MITRE in 2002 and has supported numerous information technology modernization efforts at MITRE's Center for Enterprise Modernization federally funded research and development center. In one of his first projects, he served as the director of the Treasury Web Application Infrastructure program, which included defining and building three enterprise data centers and migrating more than 20 key Treasury applications into the centers. In later projects for CMS and the Food and Drug Administration, Lee led several data center acquisition and modernization efforts that resulted in significantly improved capabilities supporting hundreds of federal applications.
Although he has an undergraduate degree in chemistry and an executive M.B.A., Lee notes that as his career has developed, economics increasingly played a role in his work, and his interest in the discipline grew. "Economics is a challenging topic," he says. "It's applicable in many areas and has an important impact on the kinds of things we do here at MITRE, especially when it comes to large-scale enterprise transformation or systems engineering programs."
That realization was central to his decision to pursue a doctorate in economics. As he progressed through his graduate program, he found that several of his classes and his independent research related directly to what he was doing at CTH. For example, in Lee's dissertation, Essays in Health Economics: Empirical Studies on Determinants of Health, he took an analytical approach to factors that determine health and health costs, including income, age, gender, race, education level, occupation, geography, and lifestyle. This type of analysis has given him a richer perspective on some complex problems—a perspective he can apply directly to his work for CMS.
Finding Balance in a Busy Life
Lee juggled work, school, and personal life throughout the seven and a half years he studied for his doctorate. He also participated in MITRE's Accelerated Graduate Degree Program (AGDP), which provides employees with tuition support and full-time pay for some of the time they attend classes. "The AGDP was very beneficial. It gave me a better balance among work, school, and home," he says.
"At MITRE, we're very client focused, so there's an expectation that you're meeting your clients' needs, playing the role that you're supposed to play, and doing what needs to be done. So maintaining that balance was challenging."
The program began with three and a half years of coursework, followed by research and writing to complete his dissertation. "Motivating myself to do that was hard," Lee admits. "I think you have to sit down and decide, 'I'm going to write 10 pages today, and then I'm going to write 10 pages tomorrow.' You have to make sure that you maintain the discipline to keep that motivation going."
Now that his Ph.D. is complete, Lee has plans for his newly recovered free time. "My wife has a honey-do list of home repairs, like painting and refinishing the deck, that has been growing over the years," Lee laughs. "And our daughter is getting married this fall. Planning a wedding is a lot of work all by itself. Fortunately, they are doing the vast majority of that."
Lee also has more time to continue incorporating health economics into his work at MITRE. He is collaborating with colleagues who have performed similar research on work that would be beneficial to the health community, such as writing papers that address health disparities or health inequalities.
—by Katie Packard
Related Information
Articles and News
Technical Papers and Presentations
Websites
|
