Kevin Volpp, MD, PhD

Kevin Volpp is a co-director of the Penn Medicine Center for Health Care Innovation, the founding director of the Center for Health Incentives and Behavioral Economics at the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics (LDI CHIBE), director of the NIH-funded Penn CMU Roybal P30 Center in Behavioral Economics and Health, a professor of medicine at the Perelman School of Medicine, and a professor of health care Management at the Wharton School. He is also a core faculty member of the Center for Health Equity Research and Promotion (CHERP) and a board-certified practicing physician at the Philadelphia VA Medical Center.

Kevin’s research focuses on the impact of financial and organizational incentives on health outcomes. His work has been published in journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association, and Health Affairs and has been covered by media outlets such as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, Good Morning America, the BBC, National Public Radio, Time, U.S. News and World Report, USA Today, Der Spiegel, and Australian National Radio. A recent intervention study on financial incentives and smoking cessation among employees at General Electric resulted in a tripling of long-term smoking cessation rates and implementation of a program based on this approach nationally among all 152,000 GE employees in the U.S. and was the winner of the 2010 British Medical Journal Group Award for Translating Research into Practice.

Kevin’s work has been recognized by the John Thompson Prize from the Association of University Programs in Health Administration; the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), an award presented at the White House as the highest honor given by the U.S. government to early career scientists; the Outstanding Junior Investigator of the Year Award from the Society of General Internal Medicine; the Alice S. Hersh New Investigator Award from AcademyHealth; Time Magazine’s 2009 A-Z “Advances in Health” list for work on Incentives – letter “I”; and was cited for the most outstanding research paper of the year in 2010 from the Society of General Internal Medicine.

Kevin is an elected member of several honorary societies including the Institute of Medicine, National Academy of Sciences (IOM); the Association of American Physicians (AAP), and the American Society of Clinical Investigation (ASCI). He has also served as an advisor to a number of organizations including the Veterans Administration, the Accreditation Council of Graduate Medical Education (ACGME), the National Institutes of Health, CVS Caremark, Ascension Health, and McKinsey and is a member of the editorial board of the Annals of Internal Medicine.