On Feb. 6, the School of Public Health announced physician and public health expert Ateev Mehrotra as the next chair of its Health Services, Policy and Practice department starting July 1.
Mehrotra’s work focuses primarily on digital health. He studies how internet tools like telemedicine visits and remote patient monitoring have changed the delivery of healthcare. At Brown, Mehrotra will continue the digital health research he currently conducts at Harvard Medical School, where he currently serves as a professor of health care policy and medicine.
“The question I’m trying to answer is: What is the impact of (digital medicine)? Is it improving the access to care that Americans want or need? Is it improving or hurting quality and what’s the impact on spending?” Mehrotra said in an interview with The Herald.
Recently, Mehrotra’s research has focused on remote patient monitoring. “It’s a fundamentally different way of managing patients,” he said. Instead of waiting for a patient to reach out with an issue, remote patient monitoring allows doctors to virtually supervise patients and contact them if anything seems out of the ordinary.
“I think it’s really exciting that we’re seeing a real surge in the use of this kind of model,” he added. “It has some improvements in care.”
“Dr. Mehrotra’s work has been deeply influential in shaping the way we think about innovative models of care delivery,” wrote Dean of the SPH Ashish Jha in the announcement. “He has led seminal work evaluating the impact of telemedicine on costs and quality, how the rise of urgent care has reshaped the health care landscape and other critical issues around consumerism, price transparency and benefit design.”
Terrie Fox Wetle, professor emerita of health services, policy and practice — and a committee member in the search for filling the chair role — wrote in an email to The Herald that Mehrotra’s work “provides the potential for collaboration with faculty in the School of Medicine and across the University.”
“One of the great things about the department and the school is it’s really expanding,” he said, “There’s been a real surge of interest in public health, both at the undergraduate level as well as graduate students, largely because of the pandemic, so it’s been really exciting in that field to see so many people interested in learning more.”
Wetle said that Mehrotra’s knowledge of SPH and excitement stood out to her. “He was well informed about the department’s priorities and resources, and he offered an engaging vision for future direction and growth for the department,” she said.
Mehrotra has supported undergraduates and master’s students at Harvard. “That’s one of the things that I really have enjoyed at my position currently,” he said. “And as a department chair, I’m just going to be continuing doing that but on a broader scale.”
Mehrotra also currently works as a hospitalist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. This experience, alongside others practicing medicine, have fueled his interest for public health.
As chair, Mehrotra hopes to translate research done at SPH into policy with real-world impact. “To publish papers in a journal is fine, but if it doesn’t change the way that Americans get care, or the policies that regulate that care, then obviously it’s not very helpful,” he said.
Mehrotra explained that to accomplish this would mean encouraging department members to have conversations with local or national legislators to explain the implications of their research and how it could change their policies.
“That means we’re actually translating our work into real change,” he added. “It isn’t easy, policy is very messy, but whatever I can do to support our faculty in that quest is really something that I’m excited about.”
Cate Latimer is a senior staff writer covering faculty and higher education. She is from Portland, OR, and studies English and Urban Studies. In her free time, you can find her playing ultimate frisbee or rewatching episodes of Parks and Rec.
