David Chan

David Chan, MD, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at the Stanford School of Medicine, an investigator at the Department of Veterans Affairs, and a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Chan’s research focuses on explaining productivity variation within US health care. He is particularly interested in studying what drives physician behavior, including organizational features of workplace design, financial and social incentives, and the use of information. He is also interested in designing interventions to improve productivity in health care firms and to understand behavioral pathways through which this may take place. He is the recipient of the 2014 NIH Director’s High-Risk, High-Reward Early Independence Award to study the optimal balance of information in health information technology for patient care.

Dr. Chan received master’s degrees in policy and economics from the London School of Economics and Oxford University, where he studied as a Marshall scholar. He holds a medical degree from UCLA and a PhD in economics from MIT. He trained in internal medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and was an instructor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, prior to coming to Palo Alto, where he currently is a hospitalist at the Department of Veterans Affairs, Palo Alto.