David Asch is Executive Director of the Penn Medicine Center for Health Care Innovation and the John Morgan Professor at the Perelman School of Medicine and the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. His research aims to improve how physicians and patients make health choices, combining economic analysis with psychological theory and consumer marketing in the field now called behavioral economics.

From 1998 to 2012 he was Executive Director of the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics. He created and from 2001 to 2012 co-directed the VA Center for Health Equity Research and Promotion—the Department of Veterans Affairs’ national center to support vulnerable populations and reduce disparities in health and health care.
Since 2012, he has directed health care innovation at Penn Medicine. Defining projects include streamlining clinical services, re-directing digital information flows for better clinical care and reduced clinician burden, developing and deploying information technology platforms to better engage patients in the management of acute and chronic disease, reducing dependence on tobacco and opioids and increasing the uptake of effective cancer screening and management, moving care safely out of hospitals and emergency rooms, and reshaping health benefit designs for greater value and employee satisfaction.

He is a founding partner of the behavioral economics consulting firm, VAL Health.

Dr. Asch received his bachelor’s degree from Harvard University and his MD from Weill-Cornell Medical College. He was a resident in Internal Medicine and a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania and received his MBA in Health Care Management and Decision Sciences from the Wharton School.

Authored by David Asch, M.D.