People

“I like to use the tools of statistics to see what you can learn about a topic. In healthcare, there are lots of opportunities for doing that.”

Originally from Overland Park, Kansas, Olivia Zhao (she/her) grew up a rabid baseball fan, following her beloved Kansas City Royals and still to this day catching ball games at Fenway Park in Boston. Even as a young girl, she was particularly fascinated by and the stories and statistics that can be mined from a day on the diamond. “I’ve loved baseball since I was a very small child,” she says. “I also have played softball all my life—currently I’m on the Harvard health policy team. Whether watching or playing, sports are a social experience, but you also get the chance to analyze things quantitatively and get a detailed look at what’s going on. I guess that kind of parallels my approach to academic life.”

As an undergrad at MIT, Olivia was drawn to the social sciences. “I didn’t know the specifics of what they covered,” she says, “but I always loved history, social studies, and math, so the social sciences were very appealing to me. Also, all the questions I found most interesting were being studied there by economists, so I wanted to learn how to use their methods to make meaning out of data.

“As for why I chose to specialize in health policy, I think it’s because a person’s health has such a universal reach in their life. If you can improve the system in some way then you can have a lot of impact. I just knew I would find interesting problems by focusing my research on health care policy.” To learn more about health systems, Olivia spent two years in the UK studying the pros and cons of a public system facing increased privatization.

Research

Olivia’s research hones in on the pharmaceutical industry and looking at the lifecycle of a drug. “It starts, of course, with research and development at huge drug companies, which is very expensive,” she says. “You want incentives for companies to make drugs, but then you get to the point where someone has to pay for them. The question is, how do insurers and payers decide what to pay for drugs, and how does that affect patients who may be faced with a very high price tag? The final link to patients comes when doctors write prescriptions. For the longest time, doctors didn’t know the costs that their patients would incur. Today, there are new electronic tools that show doctors the price of a given drug, as well as lower-cost alternatives. I’m curious to see if having that visibility impacts their decision of which drug to prescribe and how this affects patients’ financial well-being and actual health.”