Peter Ubel is interested in athletics, but he never spent enough time in any one sport to become great in it before moving on to another. He also says he picks up too many hobbies.
So it should come as no surprise that his career also jumps across disciplines on a regular basis.
"I am a deeply undisciplined person," he said with a laugh.
The pun is appropriate coming from a medical doctor who said he always felt like an arts and science professor. Ubel joins the Duke faculty in business and public policy from the University of Michigan, where he was a professor in the School of Medicine and a practicing internist at the VA Hospital in Ann Arbor.
He plans to start seeing patients again when he gets his North Carolina medical license. But Ubel's research interest lies in behavioral psychology, and at Duke he will serve as John O. Blackburn Professor of Business Administration in the Fuqua School of Business and professor of public policy at the Sanford School.
"One of the exciting things about coming to Duke was when I thought about applying for psychology or public policy positions at other universities, I faced the problem that I don't have a Ph.D.," Ubel said in an interview recently in his Fuqua School office. "Here, I'm in a situation where there are two interdisciplinary schools that looked beyond my lack of credentials because they were interested in my research."
That research explores controversial questions about the roles of values and expectations in health care decision-making. What constitutes informed consent in a situation where the balance of knowledge between doctor and patient is decidedly unequal? How do patients decide whether or not to undergo chemotherapy? How does society distribute health care resources?
Ubel's career path started early, when as a medical student he challenged his professors about patient-doctor interaction. "I didn't ask the usual questions a medical student asks," he said. "I was interested in knowing why people made the medical decisions that they did."
This is an under-researched area that Ubel has shed light on through three books and numerous journal articles and in the public sphere through interviews and opinion articles on National Public Radio, the New York Times and elsewhere.
His research methodology has included tape recording interviews between doctors and patients and giving Palm pilots to patients that prompt them to notate their moods every 30 minutes. The research points to unique elements of consumer behavior in health care decision-making.
"What we found is there are interesting differences between buying (a medical procedure) and buying, for example, cookies," he said. "You get lots of chances to buy cookies, and there's a low price to pay when you make a mistake. You can always buy a different cookie.
"But when you're choosing surgery, the stakes are higher. When you hear about side effects, you make a decision, but if you end up with that side effect, it's a very serious matter. And when you're deciding whether to have chemo or not, it's literally a life and death decision."
Ubel added that people shouldn't be surprised that as a public policy issue, health care also plays out differently.
"You don't need a 2,000-page bill to regulate the sale of iPods," he said. "There are lots of economic sectors that you can afford to leave alone, where the free market governs best. But in health care, the level of complexity is too great and the need for precision is tremendous. Just to describe the pre-existing conditions that insurance companies can not lock you out of coverage is going to take dozens of pages."
His most recent book, "Free Market Madness: Why Human Nature is at Odds with Economics--and Why It Matters" (Harvard Business Press, 2009), came out of his frustration with how the health care debate was being framed.
"I remember being in the clinic seeing patients struggling with issues of obesity and appetite," he said. "They knew they needed to do something, they wanted to do something about it, and they just couldn't. At the same time, I'm reading on the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal that the government simply needs to ensure that patients get the information they want and stay out of the way. That idea is so disconnected to the reality that I was seeing on a daily basis in the clinic that I needed to respond.
"If we are to create a compassionate society, we can't just let market decide health care. We have to find right balance of market and non-market forces."
Ubel will teach his first class this spring in the Sanford School on health care policy. He promises a severe twist of "behavioral psychology." His dream class, he added, would be on the "Politics of Irrationality." He has hired his first postdocs with Fuqua colleague Dan Ariely, author of "The Upside of Irrationality."
He comes to Duke with his wife Paula Greeno, who was hired to help Fuqua with its global initiatives. Their two boys, age 10 and 12 are major basketball fans and are excited about the move to Tobacco Road.
"We're all learning the basketball culture here," he said. "We're learning to watch what shade of blue we wear."