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Comprehensive Assessment of Reform Efforts (COMPARE)

an image of a doctor looking into the throat of a young patient

The RAND Corporation's COMPARE initiative provides information and tools to help policymakers, the media, and other interested parties understand, design, and evaluate health policies.

What is RAND COMPARE?

COMPARE is a transparent, evidence-based approach to providing information and tools to help policymakers, the media, and other interested parties understand, design, and evaluate health policies.

RAND COMPARE has four objectives:

Synthesize what is known about the current health care system.
Describe policy options that have been proposed to address one or more existing challenges.
Analyze the effects of different health care policy options on multiple dimensions of health system performance.
Identify gaps in our knowledge about the effects of policy changes.

Rather than constructing specific policy proposals, COMPARE offers objective analyses of policy options currently being used, considered, or discussed by public and private policymakers

Visit RAND COMPARE

How Does RAND COMPARE Work?

COMPARE was developed to help public and private decisionmakers systematically assess and compare the effects of different policies across multiple dimensions of health care system performance, encompassing cost, quality, and access. COMPARE gives users a comprehensive framework in which to examine both the intended and unintended effects of changes in health care policy and to examine trade-offs across policies, or across different dimensions of performance for any particular policy (e.g., the effect on spending compared to the effect on insurance coverage or on patient experience).

The Web site includes four main sections, U.S. Health Care Today, Policy Options, Analysis of Options, and Modeling Estimates.

Principal Investigators

Jeffrey Wasserman

Jeffrey Wasserman is a Senior Policy Researcher at RAND with over 25 years of experience directing health services research projects in the areas of public health and health care financing. He is co-leading RAND COMPARE in the hopes of examining the impact of alternative ways to reform the health care system.

Beth McGlynn is the Associate Director of RAND Health and she holds the Distinguished Chair in Health Care Quality. She is internationally known for her work measuring the quality of care delivered to adults and children in the United States. She is currently co-directing the COMPARE initiative with Jeffrey Wasserman.