Meredith Rosenthal, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of health economics and policy at Harvard School of Public Health. Dr. Rosenthal received her Ph.D. in health economics at Harvard University in 1998. Her principal research interests revolve around economic incentives that influence provider and consumer health care decisions. She is currently working on a series of related projects that examine evolving trends in the health insurance market, including financial incentives for improving health care quality and patient safety and consumer-directed health benefits. Dr. Rosenthal, along with colleagues at Harvard, has undertaken several efforts related to the practice of pay-for-performance and its theoretical and empirical underpinnings. Dr. Rosenthal is currently principal investigator on an evaluation of PacifiCare's Quality Incentive Program, one of the largest commercial health plan efforts to reward health care quality; her evaluation is being conducted with funding from The Commonwealth Fund. In the area of hospital quality, Dr. Rosenthal and colleagues at the Harvard Medical School are using all-payer discharge data from HealthShare Technology, Inc., to model alternative approaches to scoring hospitals on both cost and quality measures for pay-for-performance and tiered network efforts.