Cheryl L. Damberg

Biography

Cheryl Damberg is a senior policy researcher at the RAND Corporation and a professor at the Pardee RAND Graduate School. Her areas of expertise include pay for performance (P4P), quality measurement, patient safety, consumer-directed health plans, and assessing the impact of health care reform initiatives on quality and costs. She is principal investigator (PI) on a project funded by the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), examining the use of episodes of care as a basis for payment and for performance accountability; and is a lead investigator on the RAND–Watson Wyatt three-year study of Consumer-Directed Health Plans. Damberg served as co-PI on a study of physician P4P and its application to the Medicare fee schedule for DHHS, and she led an evaluation of the Integrated Healthcare Association's P4P program, the largest such program in the United States. She also recently served as PI on a project to examine the state of the art in hospital P4P and assist the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services with developing a plan for value-based purchasing of Medicare hospital services. Damberg's prior professional experience includes working as research director to the Pacific Business Group on Health, senior consultant to Fortune 100 firms for the MEDSTAT Group, and research fellow for DHHS's Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion. Damberg received her Ph.D. in public policy from the Pardee RAND Graduate School.

Biography

Expertise

Cheryl Damberg, PhD, is a Senior Researcher at RAND, with 18 years of experience as a health policy analyst and researcher for the government and private industry. Her areas of expertise include evaluating the impact of pay for performance programs, constructing and using episodes of care for quality measurement and payment, developing clinical decision support meaningful use measures, evaluating the implementation of health IT, quality measurement, measuring patient experience with care, patient safety, assessing the effects of consumer-directed health plans on costs and quality, and assessing the impact of health care reform on the quality of care and health care costs.

Recent Work

Dr. Damberg has led a number of pay for performance (P4P) program evaluations, including the Integrated Healthcare Association's P4P program, which is the largest P4P program in operation in the U.S. Currently, she is examining unintended consequences associated with P4P by assessing whether P4P is further exacerbating disparities in care. In 2006-2007, Dr. Damberg served as the Principal Investigator on a project to examine the sate-of-the-art in hospital P4P and to assist the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) with developing a plan for value-based purchasing of Medicare hospital services (the elements of which are embedded in the Affordable Care Act of 2010). In 2005/2006, Dr. Damberg led a study of physician P4P and its application to the Medicare fee schedule for the US DHHS. She also was a co-investigator on the evaluation of the CMS-Premier hospital P4P demonstration and is a consultant to the evaluation of the hospital P4P demonstration in the United Kingdom.

Currently, Dr. Damberg is leading a CMS-funded project to evaluate the reasons Medicare beneficiaries voluntarily disenroll from their Part D prescription drug plans. She is also leading an effort through an ONC-HIT-funded project to solicit specialty input regarding the establishment of specialty-specific meaningful use objectives and measures for clinical decision support tools.

In 2008-2009, Dr. Damberg led a team that examined issues related to defining episodes of care for the purposes of quality measurement and payment reform for the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation. As follow-on to this project, RWJ has funded Dr. Damberg to develop episode-based measures of quality that could be used as part of payment reform efforts tied to episdoes of care. Dr. Damberg's past research includes a three-year study of Consumer Directed Health Plans and a six-year evaluation of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality's patient safety initiative.

Dr. Damberg's prior professional experience includes serving as the Director of Research to the Pacific Business Group on Health, a Senior Consultant to Fortune 100 firms for the MEDSTAT Group and as a Research Fellow for the United States Department of Health and Human Services' Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion.