Dr Alena Podeneva
Research Fellow

Profile

Biography

Alena Podaneva is a Research Fellow in the Health and Social Care Policy research group at the Centre for Health Economics, University of York, since July 2025. She holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Luxembourg. Her PhD thesis, which received the Excellent Thesis Award 2023/2024, provides novel theoretical and empirical insights into the challenges and inefficiencies of public-private partnerships in the UK healthcare sector, with a focus on risk allocation, contract enforcement, and the design failures of Private Finance Initiatives.

She has expertise in contract design in the healthcare sector and in public-private partnerships. Her work primarily focuses on the design and evaluation of procurement models for hospitals and healthcare services, with particular interest in incentives, outsourcing, and the relationships between health system agents. Alena applies a wide range of econometric and contract-theoretic techniques to analyse healthcare data. Her portfolio is expanding to include interdisciplinary research on the effectiveness and cost-efficiency of mental health interventions in the UK.

At CHE, she is currently involved in UK-wide collaborative projects, including "Support 2 Work", funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research, and "Measuring NHS outputs, inputs and productivity", funded by the Department of Health.

Research

Overview

• Effectiveness and cost-efficiency of mental health and other healthcare services
• Productivity in the healthcare sector
• Public-private partnerships in UK healthcare
• Contract design and risk allocation in healthcare procurement
• Empirical analysis of Private Finance Initiatives (PFIs)
• Economics of outsourcing healthcare services

Projects

• Support 2 Work, funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research
• Measuring NHS outputs, inputs and productivity, funded by the Department of Health

Research group(s)

• Health and Social Care Policy

External activities

Invited talks and conferences

• French Economic Association (AFSE) 71st Congress, SciencesPo (France, Paris)
• 1st Croatian Health Economics Workshop (Croatia, Opatija)
• European Association for Research in Industrial Economics (EARIE) 50th Conference, Luiss University (Italy, Rome)
• Italian Health Economics Association (AIES) XXVIII Conference, Sapienza University (Italy, Rome)
• 25th Applied Economics Meeting (AEM): awarded travelling scholarship (Spain, Toledo)
• European Association for Research in Industrial Economics (EARIE) 52nd Conference, Universitat de València (Spain, Valencia)