Health Care Quality Assurance

Contents:

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.

Research conducted by: RAND Health; RAND Europe; RAND Justice, Infrastructure, and Environment

All Items (1339)

Project

Evaluating Disability Ratings and Workers' Compensation Medical Treatment in California — Apr 5, 2012

Evaluating California's disability ratings and worker outcomes can help to assess the accuracy and consistency of these ratings, identify potential practices and policies that would improve both the quality and the efficiency of the medical care provided under the California workers' compensation system, and increase the efficiency of the medical benefit administration.

Journal Article

The Health Care Experiences of British Pensioners Migrating to Spain: A Qualitative Study — Apr 1, 2012

This paper focuses on a type of patient mobility that has had a significant growth in the past decades: British pensioners who have moved from Northern European countries to Spain.

Journal Article

Patient Experience of Care in the Safety Net: Current Efforts and Challenges — Apr 1, 2012

Tailored measurement and quality improvement resources, coupled with policy mandates to give all patients a voice, would improve the quality of patient-centered care in safety-net organizations.

Journal Article

Consumers' and Providers' Responses to Public Cost Reports, and How to Raise the Likelihood of Achieving Desired Results — Apr 1, 2012

Public reporting of health care costs is intended to motivate consumers to choose lower cost providers, and motivate providers to lower costs to retain market share. Measures should be chosen based on which pathway policymakers intend to influence.

Journal Article

Patients Value Metastatic Cancer Therapy More Highly Than Is Typically Shown Through Traditional Estimates — Apr 1, 2012

There is a growing emphasis on promoting medical treatments that provide the most benefits relative to their costs.

Journal Article

Survey Results Show That Adults Are Willing to Pay Higher Insurance Premiums for Generous Coverage of Specialty Drugs — Apr 1, 2012

This study estimated how healthy people value insurance coverage of specialty drugs, defined as high-cost drugs that treat cancer and other serious health conditions like multiple sclerosis, by quantifying willingness to pay via a survey.

Journal Article

Involving Primary Care Clinicians in Quality Improvement: An Independent Evaluation of the Health Foundation's Engaging with Quality in Primary Care Programme : Final Report — Apr 1, 2012

Clinicians need to focus fully on quality improvement to ensure their interventions achieve full potential.

Report

Focus on Health Information Technology — Mar 30, 2012

For nearly a decade, RAND researchers have studied how health information technology (HIT) stands to change health care.

Commentary

Using Patient Surveys to Rate Hospitals — Mar 22, 2012

Hospitals that perform better on the survey tend to do better on clinical measures, have fewer readmissions within 30 days and have lower risk-adjusted mortality, write Marc Elliott and Alan Zaslavsky.

Journal Article

Ways to Improve Health Care Provider 'Report Cards' — Mar 5, 2012

As health care reform expands the use of "report cards" to grade health care providers, greater attention to reporting methods may be needed to assure the quality of such efforts.

News Release

Ways to Improve Health Care Provider 'Report Cards' — Mar 5, 2012

As health care reform expands the use of "report cards" to grade health care providers, greater attention to reporting methods may be needed to assure the quality of such efforts.

Journal Article

Are There Differences in the Medicare Experiences of Beneficiaries in Puerto Rico Compared with Those in the U.S. Mainland? — Mar 1, 2012

The authors compare the experiences of elderly Medicare beneficiaries in Puerto Rico with their English-preferring and Spanish-preferring Medicare counterparts in the U.S. mainland.

Journal Article

Rasch Analysis in the Development of a Simplified Version of the National Eye Institute Visual-Function Questionnaire-25 for Utility Estimation — Mar 1, 2012

This study developed a vision-targeted health state classification system based on the National Eye Institute Visual Function Questionnaire-25 (NEI VFQ-25).

Journal Article

Outcomes of Social Care for Adults: Developing a Preference-Weighted Measure — Mar 1, 2012

The aim of this study was to develop a measure of social care outcome, an equivalent to the quality-adjusted life year (QALY) in health, which could be used in a range of circumstances.

Journal Article

Comparative Effectiveness of Oxaliplatin Vs Non-Oxaliplatin-Containing Adjuvant Chemotherapy for Stage III Colon Cancer — Feb 1, 2012

The addition of oxaliplatin to 5-FU appears to be associated with better survival among patients receiving adjuvant colon cancer treatment in the community.

Journal Article

Treatment of Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder: Patterns of Evolving Care During the First Treatment Episode — Feb 1, 2012

Journal Article

Sources of Regional Variation in Medicare Part D Drug Spending — Feb 1, 2012

Regional variation in Medicare Part D spending for prescription drugs results largely from differences in the cost of drugs selected rather than prescription volume.

Journal Article

Pay-for-performance Programs to Reduce Racial/Ethnic Disparities: What Might Different Designs Achieve? — Feb 1, 2012

We used patient-level quality scores from the Hospital Quality Alliance and ranked hospitals by overall quality and by racial/ethnic disparities and modeled the effects of different pay-for-performance designs on national disparity scores.

Journal Article

Cost Implications of ACGME's 2011 Changes to Resident Duty Hours and the Training Environment — Feb 1, 2012

Examines net costs to teaching hospitals and cost-effectiveness to society across a range of hypothetical changes in preventable adverse events (PAEs).

Journal Article

Development of Six PROMIS Pediatrics Proxy-Report Item Banks — Feb 1, 2012

Pediatric self-report should be considered the standard for measuring patient reported outcomes (PRO) among children.

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Researcher Spotlight

Christopher S. Saigal

Affiliated Adjunct Staff

Christopher S. Saigal

Christopher S. Saigal is a natural scientist at the RAND Corporation and an associate professor in the Department of Urology at the UCLA School of Medicine. His research has focused on quality of care, shared decisionmaking, practice patterns, and costs of care. He is the principal investigator…

Yee-Wei Lim

Natural Scientist

Yee-Wei Lim

Yee-Wei Lim is a physician and health services researcher at the RAND Corporation. His research focuses on quality of care and health care delivery system restructuring. His current work in quality of care includes evaluation of the evidence base for continuous quality improvement studies;…

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