Alex Hoagland, PhD

Understanding patient engagement with the health system is vital to ensuring equitable access to high-value care, promoting healthy behaviors and preventive care, and ensuring that high-value innovative practices reach patients who need them most. But understanding the complicated interactions between patients, physicians, and health systems requires careful consideration of individual incentives and responses to information.

Professor Alex Hoagland is a health economist with an expertise in applying quasi-experimental methods and economic theory to study these decision-making processes at the patient, physician, and payer level, as well as their interaction. He uses structural, applied micro-econometric techniques and microeconomic theory—including behavioural economics—to assess the effects of medical innovation and new health information on patient access and outcomes. 

By focusing on how information and potential bias shapes decision-making, his research has explored the take-up of high-value care by consumers, the adoption of innovative health technologies by providers, and ensuring equitable access to healthcare in a variety of applied settings, in both Canada and the United States. His published and ongoing work has studied a variety of settings, including preventive care, mental healthcare, and cardiovascular disease.  

Utilizing administrative data and quasi-experimental designs, Dr. Hoagland and his team carefully identify how policies and practices shape patient-physician interactions and outcomes. In this way, his research promotes equitable access to care and improved patient outcomes for all.