Overview

Dr. Franklin Wharam is a general internist, health policy researcher, Professor of Medicine in the Division of General Internal Medicine, and a core faculty member in the Margolis Institute. Dr. Wharam is a leading scholar in research about cost sharing and health insurance designs including value-based (VBID), consumer-directed (CDHP), and high-deductible health plans (HDHP). His work has been published in journals such as Annals of Internal Medicine, JAMA, the New England Journal of Medicine, and Health Affairs. He leads large-scale national health policy studies and was the national co-chair of the Natural Experiments in Diabetes Translation (NEXT-D3) research collaborative.

Dr. Wharam also directs the Health Policy Research Center in the Duke University Department of Medicine. The Center seeks to answer fundamental questions in health policy, such as: Which health policies make people healthier? and Which do not work? The Health Policy Research Center has a nationally recognized program of studies applying rigorous quasi-experimental and causal-inference methods to consequential health-policy questions. Members have particular expertise in controlled interrupted time-series, difference-in-differences, segmented survival, and other natural-experiment designs using large commercial insurance, Medicare, Medicaid, and pharmacy datasets. A central scientific focus is how health insurance and benefit designs - including CDHPs, VBID, HDHPs, and population-tailored benefits - affect access to care, treatment use, spending, and health outcomes among chronically ill and vulnerable populations. The Center conducts research among people with diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular disease, substance use disorders, cancer, and mental illness. Research projects seek to produce evidence that is methodologically rigorous, clinically focused, and directly useful to patients, policymakers, health insurers, and employers. 

The Center's recent and ongoing national NIH projects led by Dr. Wharam include: Impact of HDHPs and the 2020 Public Health Emergency on Alcohol Use Disorder Treatment Access, Outcomes, and Subpopulations (NIAAA: R01AA029819); Long-term Impact of Reduced Patient Out-of-pocket Costs on Diabetes Complications (CDC/NIDDK: 6U18DP006696); Evaluating Two Novel, Population-Tailored Health Insurance Designs: Impact on Diabetes Outcomes (NIDDK: R01DK143928); Impact of 3 Employer Strategies to Expand Access to Care on Alcohol Use Disorder Diagnosis, Treatment, and Outcomes (NIAAA; R01AA033041); and Effect of Population-Tailored Health Insurance on Cardiovascular Disease Outcomes and Disparities (NHLBI: R01HL1785392). Health Policy Research Center members have longstanding collaborative partnerships with colleagues at Harvard Medical School’s Department of Population Medicine, the Emory University Rollins School of Public Health, and the Wake Forest University School of Medicine. These sustained partnerships enable the Center to assemble multidisciplinary teams and generate timely evidence about both the intended and unintended effects of health policies, with attention to affordability, vulnerable populations, and health outcomes.

Dr. Wharam joined Duke in 2021 after 17 years at the Harvard Medical School Department of Population Medicine. There he held the Martin Robison Delany endowed chair and was Director of the Division of Health Policy and Insurance Research. Before Harvard, he completed Internal Medicine residency at Duke in 2004. 

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