Bio

Dr. Igna Bonfrer is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and also holds a position as Assistant Professor at the institute of Health Policy and Management from the Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands. Her research aims to evaluate the intended and unintended consequences of health care financing reforms such as pay-for-performance and health insurance.

Dr. Bonfrer is currently leading research projects on the evaluation of financial incentives in hospitals and dialysis centers in the United States, as implemented under the Affordable Care Act. The main outcomes of interest in these projects are Quality of Care and Costs. Her research involves the analysis of very large data sets, including the health care utilization of all 52 million Medicare beneficiaries over the last decade. Dr. Bonfrer has been successful in acquiring funding for her scientific research, most recently through an Rubicon Fellowship from the Dutch government.

Her earlier PhD research was titled “Evaluating Health Care Financing Reforms in Africa” and is available here. In six different studies which were published in among others Health Affairs, The Lancet, Health Policy and Planning and Social Science & Medicine, she evaluated health insurance schemes and performance based financing policies implemented in a range of different African countries. She led teams of up to 40 members in Kenya and Burkina Faso to collect, clean and analyze data from large household surveys in rural areas. This has resulted in scientific publications and specific recommendations for health care policy makers. 

For Dr. Bonfrer's latest publications please visit: www.bmg.eur.nl/bonfrer