Dr Roxanne Kovacs
Research Fellow
in Health Economics
LSHTM
15-17 Tavistock Place
London
WC1H 9SH
United Kingdom
I am a health economist working in the Department of Global Health and Development and joined the School in 2015. I was recently awarded a three-year Wellcome Trust post-doctoral Research Fellowship. My fellowship focuses on patients' healthcare seeking behaviour in Kenya.
I currently work on:
- The PEMBA project (Performance-based financing mechanisms for health system strengthening in Africa), funded by the MRC, ESRC, DfID and the Wellcome Trust, which examines the health system effects of pay for performance in Zimbabwe and Mozambique.
- The EQUI-PMAQ project, funded by the MRC-CONFAP, which examines the effect of Brazil’s national pay for performance scheme (PMAQ) on inequalities in the financing and delivery of primary care.
- A project that examines the determinants of the quality of healthcare and health worker performance in Senegal, funded by the Health Systems Research Initiative (ESRC, MRC, Wellcome trust)
I am a member of the Centre for Health Economics in London (CHIL) and I am active in the “Preferences and behaviour” as well as the “Evaluation of complex policy interventions” theme groups.
I won the 2018 “Three Minute Thesis” competition at LSHTM. My talk is available here: https://vimeo.com/275033858
Centres
Teaching
I teach on the Economic Analysis of Health Policy (EAHP) as well as the Introduction to Health Economics (IHE) modules.
Research
My research interests revolve around the behaviours and preferences of stakeholders in the healthcare system. I am particularly interested in the determinants of healthcare provider and patient behaviour, relating to the quality of healthcare delivered and care seeking.
My PhD examined the patient-provider interaction in Senegal from a health economics perspective and looked at:
- Whether patients can affect the quality of care they receive by volunteering information to providers
- The association between failures related to the way healthcare providers think, in particular, the cognitive bias of overconfidence, and the quality of healthcare delivered
- How we can best measure patient trust in a low-income setting (using data from a trust questionnaire and a lab-in the-field experiment)
