Professor Adam Elshaug
Adam Elshaug, B.A., B.Sc. (Hons), M.P.H., Ph.D., is a researcher and policy advisor specialising in measuring and reducing waste (e.g. low-value care) to optimise value in health care, an area in which he has developed novel, award winning methods utilising administrative health data. At the University of Melbourne he is Professor in Health Policy with joint appointments in the Melbourne School of Population and Global Health (MSPGH) and Melbourne Medical School, and is Director, Centre for Health Policy (MSPGH), home to over 80 staff.
Adam sits on numerous national and international committees, including the newly formed (2021-) Medicare Benefits Schedule (MBS) Review Advisory Committee (MRAC) which takes over from the 2015-20 MBS Review Taskforce on which he also sat, including its Principles and Rules Sub-Committee. In 2022 he is also a Ministerial appointee to the Strengthening Medicare Taskforce – Chaired by the Commonwealth Minister for Health. Adam is a member of 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, which includes designing and overseeing economic modelling across the spectrum of cancer care. In late 2022 Adam completed a 5-year Board appointment of the New South Wales (NSW) Bureau of Health Information (BHI) which reports on the performance of the NSW public health system.
Adam is a Non-Resident Senior Fellow with the Lown Institute, Boston. He 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. 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 (where he is now Honorary Professor). 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 $145 million in research funding and published approximately 180 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.