Kristin M. Madison

Professor Madison holds a joint appointment in the School of Law and the Bouvé College of Health Sciences. Her primary research is in the areas of health economics, health law and health policy.

After receiving her undergraduate degree from the University of California at Berkeley, Professor Madison worked for two years as a research assistant with the health care consulting firm now known as the Lewin Group. She contributed to several articles assessing the impact of the delivery of mental health services. She then received a JD from Yale Law School and a PhD in economics from Stanford University before joining the Universiy of Pennsylvania law faculty in 2001; she came to Northeastern University in 2011.

Much of Professor Madison’s recent work evaluates the implications of health care quality reporting and related trends for patients, providers and regulators. In two early articles published in the journal Health Services Research, she used Medicare data to analyze the relationships between the presence of health provider affiliations (including multihospital systems and physician-hospital organizations) and patient treatment. In “Regulating Health Care Quality in an Information Age” she argues that the information revolution within health care will produce a shift from more traditional market-displacing regulatory approaches to market-channeling and market-facilitating regulatory approaches. She considers ways to reshape health care regulation in light of the greater availability of health care information. The article “Hospital Mergers in an Era of Quality Improvement” examines the use of quality measures in the Evanston Northwestern antitrust litigation and comments more generally on the relationship between mergers and health care quality. In “The Law and Policy of Quality Reporting,” Professor Madison explores the health care quality reporting phenomenon, reviewing empirical findings on its effects and discussing the New York attorney general’s settlement with health insurers concerning their provider rating mechanisms. Several other of her recent works focus on related topics.

Professor Madison has also co-authored a chapter on health policy and regulation in the forthcoming 6th edition of Shortell and Kaluzny’s Health Care Management: Organization, Design, and Behavior with Peter D. Jacobson and Gary Young.