Adam Elshaug

Senior Fellow

Professor Adam Elshaug, B.A., B.Sc. (Hons), M.P.H., Ph.D., is Director of the Centre for Health Policy (MSPGH) with joint Chair appointments in the Melbourne School of Population and Global Health (MSPGH) and Melbourne Medical School (MMS).

He is a researcher and policy advisor specialising in measuring and reducing waste (e.g. low-value care) to optimize value in health care, an area in which he has developed novel, award winning methods utilising administrative health data.

Adam works closely with national and state governments, and third party payers to design and implement reforms to reduce waste and optimise health care safety and value, including the design and evaluation of alternative models of care and payment. He sits on numerous national and international committees, including most recently as a Ministerial appointee to the Medicare Benefits Schedule Review Taskforce and its Principles and Rules Sub-Committee. Currently he is a Board Member of the New South Wales (NSW) Bureau of Health Information (BHI) which reports on the performance of the NSW public health system, a member of the Health Services Principal Advisory Committee for Cancer Council Australia, on the Expert Advisory Committee for Evidence-based Interventions (NICE, NHS England and NHS Improvement). Since 2014 he has been economic and policy advisor to Cancer Australia.

Adam was a 2010-11 Commonwealth Fund Harkness Fellow based at the US Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). From mid-2011 to mid-2013, he then served as NHMRC Sidney Sax Fellow in Harvard Medical School’s Department of Health Care Policy. In parallel, he became The Commonwealth Fund’s Inaugural Visiting Fellow for 2012-13 in New York. To 2017 he was an elected Member of the Executive Committee of the Health Services Research Association of Australia and NZ (HSRAANZ). For 2019-20 he was a Visiting Fellow in the Economics Studies’ USC-Brookings Schaeffer Initiative for Health Policy at The Brookings Institution in Washington DC.

From 2013-2020 Adam was based at the University of Sydney, in 2016 becoming Co-Director of the Menzies Centre for Health Policy. He is recipient of numerous research awards and over 200 invitations to address conferences, government, academic, insurance and health technology assessment groups internationally. He has collaborated to attract over $125 million in research funding and published approximately 170 technical reports and peer reviewed articles with first-author publications in journals including The Lancet (co-lead of the 2017 Right Care series), NEJM, BMJ, JAMA, MJA, among others.