James Chambers | Professor
Tufts Medical Center

James Chambers is an investigator at the Center for the Evaluation of Value and Risk in Health at Tufts Medical Center, and a Professor of Medicine at Tufts University School of Medicine. As the basis for this research, he developed a novel database of specialty therapy coverage policies issued by the largest US commercial health plans (The SPEC Database). He has taken a mixed methods approach to examining health plan decision making. His research has highlighted variation in patients’ access to specialty therapies across commercial and Medicaid plans and in plan’s use of various utilization management tools. He has also evaluated the factors that influence plan decision-making and has found that, among other things, a drug’s cost-effectiveness is associated with coverage restrictiveness. He graduated from Queens University in Belfast with an MPharm degree and previously worked as a pharmacist in the UK and Ireland. James also obtained an MSc from the University of York and PhD from Brunel University, both in Health Economics.