RAND advances understanding of health and health behaviors and examines how the organization and financing of care affect costs, quality, and access. RAND's body of research—conducted primarily through the RAND Health division—includes innovative studies of health insurance, health care reform, health information technology, and women's health, as well as topical concerns such as obesity, complementary and alternative medicine, and PTSD in veterans and survivors of catastrophe.
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Featured at RAND
With the complex process of implementing the ACA underway, RAND research is tracking the progress of implementation and assessing the potential consequences of choices facing federal and state governments, employers, families, and individuals.
In its second term, the Obama Administration can restrain further health care spending growth—without compromising quality—by employing four broad strategies: fostering efficient and accountable providers, engaging and empowering consumers, promoting population health, and facilitating high-value innovation.
Research Briefs (325)
Discusses the large disparities between boys and men of color in California compared with their white counterparts across four broad domains -- socioeconomic, health, safety, and ready to learn.
Discusses the effects of regulating drug prices in the United States in terms of the trade-off between benefiting the current generation (with lower prices) and benefiting future generations (with greater pharmaceutical innovation).
Describes a survey tool developed for the Arthritis Research Campaign (arc) that enables arc to map its entire research portfolio, analyse the returns from individual grants and compare different types of grants.
Discusses the potential of community-based participatory research (CBPR) to reduce the burden of chronic health problems on poor and minority neighborhoods and describes three successful CBPR programs.
This research highlight updates the cumulative effects of a study of a collaborative care-based quality-improvement treatment program for depression after nine years.
This fact sheet summarizes the results of a RAND initiative to develop performance standards for distributing antibiotics and other lifesaving medical countermeasures on a large scale within the critical first 48 hours of a public health emergency.
Offers some practical implications based on the first study to demonstrate a link between exposure to sexual content on TV and subsequently becoming pregnant or being responsible for a pregnancy before the age of 20.
This research highlight summarizes an evaluation of the Enrollee Health Care Projection Model's accuracy and validity; identifies potential model enhancements; and assesses the risks posed by the VA's reliance on the model for budgeting and planning.
This research brief summarizes an analysis and comparison of two methods of patient identification -- statistical matching and unique patient identifier -- on error rates, operational efficiency, costs, and privacy and security issues.
This fact sheet summarizes research suggesting that there are basic privacy issues that need to be resolved in the implementation of a national health information network.
This fact sheet summarizes a study examining the variation of the intake of fruits and vegetables for blacks, whites, and Mexican Americans, in addition to the relationship between neighborhood socioeconomic status and this intake.
This fact sheet provides an overview of the Institute of Medicine's quality improvement framework for behavioral health care and highlights current quality improvement projects that incorporate the framework's recommendations.
This research brief describes the growing importance of environmental considerations for the Army in contingency operations and suggests ways to better address environmental issues in Army planning, training, policy, guidance, and operations.
This fact sheet summarizes a study using the 1992-1999 Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey to investigate whether age directly affects health care costs, or whether life expectancy would produce more accurate estimates of future expenditures.
This fact sheet describes a study that confirms, for the first time, that better physician process of care leads to better health-related quality of life for patients receiving ambulatory care.
This fact sheet describes how patients' use of acupuncture affects use of conventional medical services and suggests that acupuncture often substitutes for other, more expensive services, thereby reducing total medical costs.
This fact sheet summarizes research on mechanisms that affect overeating but that operate below the level of individual awareness and beyond individual control.
This research brief describes how insights from the field of economics -- human capital theory and monetary payoffs -- provide science-based guidance for early childhood policy.
This fact sheet describes a model of constrained choice that explains how policy decisions at the family, work, community, and government levels can have unintended consequences that ultimately produce differences in men's and women's health.
This research brief summarizes a comprehensive RAND study of the mental health and cognitive needs of returning servicemembers and veterans of Operations Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom.
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