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Lucy Xiaolu Wang, assistant professor of resource economics, has been honored with the Best Young Researcher Award at the 15^th annual Conference on Health IT and Analytics (CHITA), held April 26-27 at The University of Texas at Austin McCombs School of Business. The award recognizes Wang’s contributions to the field of health information technology (HIT), particularly her research and early career leadership at the intersection of innovation, digitization and health care delivery.

“There are many fascinating questions economists can explore, and I intentionally focus on innovation and digitization in the health care market, where so many new and exciting developments are unfolding,” she notes.

At the conference, Wang presented a working paper examining how the diffusion of advanced HIT affects the number of hospital-based physicians who deliver direct patient care under hospital contracts. Co-authored with Jianjing Lin, assistant professor in the resource economics department at UMass Amherst, and Jason Huh, associate professor of economics at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the research suggests that strategic investments in HIT can attract doctors, expand care capacity and reduce geographic disparities in access to care.

Wang is now 2-for-2 at CHITA – the first time she attended, as a graduate student in 2018, she received the Best Student Paper Award and presented a paper on HIT and opioids.

Wang’s broader research includes how HIT can improve care for underserved populations across countries, how human mediation enhance compliance to digital mental health interventions (with field evidence from India) and the effectiveness of online platforms like the Human Brain Project (HBP) Forum that support collaboration among neuroscience researchers. She also has several ongoing projects on digitization and AI in health care across different settings.

In addition to her research, Wang serves as the inaugural program chair of the Innovation and Digitization program area of the American Society of Health Economists and is a co-founder and inaugural convener for the Digital Health Technology special interest group of the International Health Economics Association.