The Leon Hess Professorship of Internal Medicine
Established in 2006 by Constance H. Williams and her husband Sankey V. Williams, MD, the chair honors Mrs. Williams’s father, Leon Hess (1914–1999).
Starting with one oil truck in the 1930s, Mr. Hess built the Hess Corporation into one of the most successful integrated oil companies in the United States. In addition, for more than a generation, he was the pioneering owner of the Jets, the professional football team. Using vision and determination, Mr. Hess worked for decades to build these ventures into icons of business and sports.
Mr. Hess was also known for his philanthropy and his devotion to family. The Professorship carries on these traditions by supporting a faculty member in the Division of Internal Medicine, which affects so many lives and which was headed by Mr. Hess’s son-in-law Sankey V. Williams, MD from 1992 to 2008. Dr. Williams currently serves on the faculty as a Professor of General Internal Medicine at the Perelman School of Medicine and Professor of Health Care Management at Wharton.
Constance H. Williams, a former state senator (2001–2009) and representative (1997–2001), has been recognized many times for her public service. She is a philanthropic leader for the arts, health, and education in the Philadelphia region. She earned her MBA from Wharton and served on the Trustees’ Council of Penn Women for many years. At Penn Medicine, the Williams have endowed not only the Professorship but also a fund to support fellows in the Division of Internal Medicine as they embark on their careers.
Current Chairholder
Jalpa A. Doshi, PhD
Jalpa A. Doshi, PhD, is the Leon Hess Professor of Internal Medicine at the Perelman School of Medicine and Director of Value-based Insurance Design Initiatives at CHIBE. She is also a Senior Fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics and Director of the Economic Evaluations Unit of the Center for Evidence-Based Practice at Penn.
Dr. Doshi’s research program aims to advance our understanding on how pharmaceuticals can be better accessed and utilized in the health care system to improve health outcomes while balancing costs. She has been a national leader in applying powerful health economics, outcomes research, and policy methods to address issues related to pharmaceutical access, costs, outcomes, and value. A key area of her research program examines the impact of prescription benefit design and reimbursement policies on access to prescription drugs, and the quality and cost of health care in vulnerable patient populations, including elderly, disabled, chronically ill and low-income patients. In a related area, her work has focused on the prevalence, causes, outcomes, and costs of suboptimal medication use in chronic diseases and the clinical and economic impact of innovative behavioral economics or policy interventions for improving medication adherence and management. Her research and teaching have also focused on advancing the methods used in pharmaceutical outcomes and cost-effectiveness research to enhance its usefulness in real world decision-making by patients, providers, payers, and policymakers. In recent years, her research program has particularly focused on specialty drugs, which have become increasingly important treatment options for patients with serious, rare, and/or chronic diseases.
She has extensive experience working with data from administrative claims, electronic medical records, surveys, registries, and clinical trials. She has coauthored Economic Evaluation in Clinical Trials (Oxford University Press), the first book dedicated entirely to this topic. Her research has received widespread attention from the media including the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Furthermore, her work has contributed directly to changes in policies of private insurers and government programs. For example, her team was the first to produce rigorous empirical research and recommend the institution of an annual out-of-pocket cost maximum combined with “smoothing” under Medicare Part D, which was recently incorporated in the Inflation Reduction Act. Her work has been recognized by numerous prestigious awards from multiple national and international organizations such as the American Geriatrics Society, American Heart Association, AcademyHealth, Patient Access Network Foundation, and the International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research (ISPOR). She has previously served as co-editor of the Value in Health journal and guest editor for its special issue on “Value Assessment Frameworks,” published in 2017. She currently serves as an associate editor of the Health Economics journal. Over the past two decades, Dr. Doshi has held multiple leadership roles within the International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research (ISPOR) including co-chairing their Annual International Meeting (2019) and serving on their board of directors (2018–21).
Previous Chairholder
- J. Sanford Schwartz, MD 2006-2021
- Judy A. Shea, PhD 2021-2024