Kai Yeung, PharmD, PhD, is a pharmacist and pharmaceutical economist with expertise in patient medication-use behaviors, insurance design, and outcomes research. His objective is to develop and evaluate incentives to encourage high-value use of health care services. Dr. Yeung has conducted research evaluating policies focused on specialty drug access, value-based insurance design, the consequences of insurance switching, and financial incentives. He combines applied econometric and cost-effectiveness analysis tools with a clinical understanding of prescription drugs and health insurance design to gain new insights in these areas.

Dr. Yeung has a line of research on designing and evaluating policies that align patient prescription drug out-of-pocket costs with estimated value using cost-effectiveness analysis. He has used econometric methods to quantify the impact of a value-based formulary on patient medication-utilization behavior, health outcomes and health care expenditures from patient and health care payer perspectives. For this work, Dr. Yeung successfully competed for two research grants: a multidisciplinary research training grant from the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and a health services research dissertation grant from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). Different parts of this project were recognized by the International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research 2014 and 2015 annual meetings as the best student podium presentation award, and the Vancouver Health Economics Methodology 2016 meeting as the best student paper award. Dr. Yeung continues to innovate in the generation and evaluation of this type of benefit design.

Dr. Yeung received his PhD in pharmaceutical economics from the Comparative Health Outcomes, Policy, and Economics (CHOICE) Institute at the University of Washington and his PharmD from the University of Southern California. During his PharmD training, Dr. Yeung cultivated a broad perspective on the expanded use of evidence and analytics in decision-making, giving him experience in working with a diverse group of health care stakeholders, including:

• patients (through the practice of clinical pharmacy),
• health care payers (through Kaiser Permanente Drug Information Services),
• federal agencies (through AHRQ and U.S. Food and Drug Administration),
• professional organizations (through the Academy for Managed Care Pharmacy), and
• international technology assessment organizations (through NIH and Clinical Excellence, UK).