Measuring Health Care Quality

"Literature Review: Using Quality Information for Health Care Decisions and Quality Improvement." Tim Lake, Chris Kvam, and Marsha Gold, May 2005. Health care quality measurement and reporting have grown rapidly during the past decade and now enjoy wide support. The CAHPS surveys, funded by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality since 1995, have been a key part of the effort to generate scientifically sound measures of consumer perspectives on health care access and quality. This report reviews the research literature on incentives for and barriers to quality reporting, and takes sstock of where CAHPS fits in and what it has accomplished to date. The authors note that CAHPS has made a standardized instrument available for assessing consumer experiences with health care, and that consumers, purchasers, and health plans find the information it generates useful.

Read more about this study and our other projects examining pay for performance, public reporting of quality data, disease management, and use of technology to monitor and encourage quality improvement.

Quality and Patient Safety Indicators

"Pneumonia, 1992-2002. MQMS Highlights: A Report from the Medicare Quality Monitoring System." Robert Schmitz, 2005. Pneumonia is the second most common cause of hospitalization and the fifth leading cause of death in the United States among persons age 65 and older. It can cause septicemia and respiratory failure, two less common but more dangerous conditions. This report summarizes trends in outcomes, including hospitalization, readmission, and mortality rates, for Medicare fee-for-service beneficiaries with these conditions across various demographic groups. Highlights. Full report.

Read more on quality and patient safety indicators.

Care Coordination in Medicare

"The Quality Oncology Medicare Coordinated Care Demonstration Project After One Year." Arnold Chen, Jennifer Schore, Randall Brown, Deborah Peikes, Sean Orzol, Clara Soh, and Karen Sautter, September 2004. Research during the past decade suggests that successful care coordination programs usually have several features. These include effective patient identification, highly qualified staff, physician buy-in, and financial incentives aligned with program goals. Successful programs also offer a well-designed, structured intervention. The purpose of this report series is to assess the extent to which demonstration programs have these features, as well as to describe early enrollees in the program and their Medicare service use and costs during the first few months after enrollment.

We are conducting other studies of best practices in care coordination as well as designing demonstrations and evaluating programs

Voices of Low-Income Mothers

"How Mothers See Fathers." Allison Zippay and Anu Rangarajan, 2005. In Good Parents or Good Workers? How Policy Shapes Families' Daily Lives. Eager to promote the involvement of absent fathers in the lives of their children, the architects of welfare reform strengthened paternity establishment and child support enforcement, in addition to increasing benefits for two-parent families. In response, policymakers are spearheading initiatives aimed at promoting healthy marriages and enhancing unmarried fathers' capacity for supporting their children emotionally and financially. Underlying the enthusiasm for these programs is the assumption that a stronger father presence is beneficial to families, even though the women who have been involved with these men are largely absent from the lobby for father-oriented initiatives. This chapter focuses on the role of fathers in low-income families' lives, describing how the mothers feel about the prospect of increased father involvement and how they view fathers' role in their children's lives.

Upcoming Presentations

At Mathematica, we are committed to making sure we communicate with researchers, practitioners, policymakers, and other groups interested in the studies we conduct. We make our work accessible through multiple strategies that include presenting to a wide variety of audiences. To access the latest news on upcoming presentations, go to our 2005 conference calendar. The calendar is updated each week.