Research

Penn State research center joins $52 million health care study

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. –- The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) has selected RAND Corp. and the Center for Health Care and Policy Research at Penn State (CHCPR) to participate in a $52 million study to investigate how high-performing health care systems promote the use of new evidence in clinical practice.

Richard Kronick, director of AHRQ, announced the funding of three Centers of Excellence on June 15 at AcademyHealth’s Annual Research Meeting in Minneapolis. Each of the three centers will receive $18 million over five years to study how complex health care delivery systems disseminate new evidence-based practices and achieve high performance.

“New evidence is valuable only if it is used,” said Kronick. “We expect this effort will give us a better understanding of how successful health care delivery systems disseminate new evidence so we can enable the rapid adoption of best practices throughout the health care system and improve patient outcomes.”

RAND Corp. and Penn State’s CHCPR will be awarded roughly $18 million for their role in the study.

Increasingly, clinicians work within complex health systems. Understanding how health systems disseminate information on what works and what does not work will facilitate successful dissemination of evidence-based practices moving forward. This project is funded by the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Trust Fund, which was created by the Affordable Care Act.

RAND Corp. and CHCPR will examine health systems in five regions with the goal of understanding the role of incentives, use of health IT and organizational integration within systems, and their impact on performance and evidence dissemination.

“The center’s work is vitally important as we know very little about what factors contribute to high performance within health care systems. If known, these factors could be adopted by lower performing health care systems to improve care more rapidly and broadly,” said Cheryl Damberg, principle investigator for RAND Corp. “A better understanding of the actions that health systems can take to ensure the rapid translation of new evidence into practice is critical to improving outcomes for patients.”

Dennis Scanlon, professor of health policy and administration and director of CHCPR, said as health reform implementation continues, significant changes are unfolding in how health care is delivered and paid for, including new models of reimbursement, new types of provider delivery systems and different approaches to managing the health of populations, such as using the best clinical evidence and understanding how to truly involve patients in decision-making.

“With so much change, it is important to study how things are playing out on the ground in different communities across the United States so we can measure the impact of these efforts and share important lessons with others,” Scanlon said. “This project builds on our extensive experience studying health improvement efforts and we look forward to the opportunity to use research and dissemination to accelerate the implementation of high value patient centered care.”

The other two research groups conducting the study include Dartmouth College in partnership with the University of California at Berkeley, Harvard University and the High Value Healthcare Collaborative, and the National Bureau of Economic Research in partnership with the Health Research and Educational Trust, and the Network of Regional Healthcare Initiatives.

Additionally, AHRQ will fund a coordinating center to help facilitate collaboration among the three centers in the development of a national compendium of the performance of health care systems across the United States.

Last Updated March 4, 2016

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