The gap between the care patients should get and what they actually receive likely contributes to thousands of preventable deaths each year, and health care systems worldwide continue to face the challenge of delivering quality care at an affordable cost. RAND has conducted research designed to measure and improve health care quality and to provide reliable decision support data to patients, providers, and purchasers.
Journal Article
This article aims to describe continuous quality improvement (CQI) for substance abuse prevention and treatment programs in a community-based organization setting.
Journal Article
The HCAHPS Survey obtains hospital patients' experiences using four modes: Mail Only, Phone Only, Mixed (mail/phone follow-up), and Touch-Tone (push-button) Interactive Voice Response with option to transfer to live interviewer (TT-IVR/Phone).
Journal Article
Patients with end-stage renal disease (ESRD) have special health needs; little is known about their care experiences.
Report
This report presents the results of an evaluation of health care performance measures, describes how performance measures are being used, summarizes key barriers and facilitators to their use, and identifies opportunities for easing that use.
Project
By measuring the quality of care for carpal tunnel syndrome (CTS) in a large workers' compensation provider organization in California and assessing value to workers and employers, RAND laid the groundwork for ongoing quality assessment and improvement programs in workers' compensation settings within California and elsewhere.
Journal Article
Complementary alternative medicine (CAM) and integrative medicine (IM) represent non-traditional approaches to health care practice that have become increasingly popular in the United States and throughout the world.
Journal Article
This chapter discussed key issues in the use of patient-reported outcome measures, with special emphasis on health-related quality of life. It also explores application of these measures for population surveillance, research, and clinical practice. Patient evaluation of care measures from the Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems are used as an example.
Journal Article
We describe overall rates and analyze predictors of unit and item nonresponse for the 695,197 Medicare beneficiaries selected for the 2007 MCAHPS survey (335,249 unit respondents, 49% overall response rate).
News Release
Under bundled payments, doctors, hospitals, and other providers share one fee for treating all aspects of a procedure such as a hip replacement or a chronic disease like diabetes. The approach should eliminate unnecessary care and improve quality, but putting it into practice is proving to be more difficult than anticipated.
Journal Article
Under bundled payments, doctors, hospitals, and other providers share one fee for treating all aspects of a procedure such as a hip replacement or a chronic disease like diabetes. The approach should eliminate unnecessary care and improve quality, but putting it into practice is proving to be more difficult than anticipated.
Report
Explores quality and utilization of diabetes care in China.
Journal Article
Research sponsored by the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute can help patients make better decisions by comparing the effectiveness of alternative therapies, but it is constrained from considering the costs of therapies it compares.
Journal Article
The Patient-Centered Medical Home (PCMH) model is an approach to providing integrated healthcare through one main point of access.
Journal Article
Comparative effectiveness reviews need to be regularly updated as new evidence is produced. Lack of attention to updating may lead to outdated and sometimes misleading conclusions that compromise health care and policy decisions.
Journal Article
Multiple dimensions of harm need to be displayed to inform human judgments of what drugs should be scheduled; recent efforts ignores drug interactions and mix aggregate and individual harms inappropriately.
News Release
Treating U.S. veterans with mental illness and substance use disorders is more expensive than caring for those with other medical conditions but the quality of mental health care offered by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs is as good as or better than that reported by privately insured, Medicare, or Medicaid populations.
Report
Treating U.S. veterans with mental illness and substance use disorders is more expensive than caring for those with other medical conditions but the quality of mental health care offered by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs is as good as or better than that reported by privately insured, Medicare, or Medicaid populations.
Research Brief
The quality of mental health care delivered by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is generally as good or better than care delivered by private health plans, although it falls short of the high standards set in VA guidelines.
Journal Article
A hospital Emergency Department's(ED's) wait times can be driven by high occupancy in its downstream InPatient hospital (IP).
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