Hannah Bassett – Fellow 2020

Hannah Bassett
Hannah Bassett

Hannah Bassett, MD is a pediatric hospitalist at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford in Palo Alto, CA. She attended University of New Mexico for medical school and completed her pediatric residency and pediatric hospital medicine fellowship at Stanford. She has a background in quality and process improvement, working as part of the Clinical Effectiveness and Clinical Pathways programs at LPCHS. Her fellowship research focused on understanding financial difficulties in the families of hospitalized children, as well as parents’ perspectives on cost transparency as part of their children’s medical care. 

I am honored to join the Costs of Care team as the 2020-2021 Fellow, following several incredible physicians and nurses (most recently Jess Keim-Malpass, RN, PhD) who have contributed to the culture of high value care nationally through innovative community building, dissemination of educational content, and translation of high value care practices to the bedside. 

I was originally introduced to the concept of high value care through more traditional quality and process improvement, exploring how to make it easy for medical teams to “do the right thing” at the point of care to decrease unnecessary variation and healthcare system waste. However, I came to realize that even the provision of the most evidence-based, high value treatment for patients could result in short or long term non-clinical harms. I therefore became interested in the impact of healthcare on families outside of clinical outcomes, and how to connect families and physicians with the costs of medical care. 

My fellowship research focused on understanding financial difficulties in families of hospitalized children, as well as parental preferences for family-centered cost transparency. The pediatric/parental perspective has largely been left out of this literature but is important as we think about global cost transparency implementation. Similarly, my upcoming research will focus on understanding patient- and family-centered cost transparency in the emergency department, a clinical area which is a common interface between the general population and the healthcare system, but also a source of high cost medical care. Understanding perspectives on cost transparency in this setting will provide further insights on the importance of this topic throughout the healthcare system.  

I am joining the Costs of Care team at a critical intersection of health, health policy, and economics in our country, where focusing on value and affordability are more important than ever. The job loss, health insurance loss, and financial uncertainty spurred by the Covid-19 pandemic are likely to exacerbate the financial impacts of what were already unsustainably high costs of healthcare in the US. I am excited to be able to contribute to ongoing research, advocacy, and education around cost transparency and financial harms of healthcare in this unique time. 

To learn more about Hannah’s fellowship research on understanding financial difficulties in families of hospitalized children, please read her completed manuscript.

One Comment on “Hannah Bassett – Fellow 2020

Chris Petrilli
November 3, 2020 at 2:19 pm

Congratulations! I really enjoyed your article in JHM – an incredibly important topic. I wish you the best of luck in helping Cost of Care succeed in their “Affordability Moonshot” program.

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