Recent Projects

The following are recently completed, high-impact RHAS projects. For a more comprehensive list of our work, visit our practice area pages or browse our publications by capability.

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  Avoiding the Tragedy of the Commons in Health Care: Policy Options for Covering High-Cost Cures

  In this Perspective, the authors discuss the risk that strategic behavior by health insurers could unravel the market for curative therapies for chronic diseases. Because the cost of these cures is front-loaded but the benefits accrue over time, insurers might attempt to delay treatment or avoid patients who require it, in the hope that they might change insurers. The authors present a framework to analyze policy options to remedy this problem.

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  Cognitive Reflection and Antibiotic Prescribing for Acute Respiratory Infections

  For some clinical decisions, there may be a 'sweet-spot' in which the benefits of intuitive versus reflective clinical decisonmaking are in balance.

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  Minding the Gaps: Measuring Quality Based on Episodes of Care

  An episode-based framework of health care quality measurement could provide a more complete picture of care than current methods. Existing quality measures could be used, but new ones would need to be developed to fill gaps in the framework.

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  Advice to Quit Smoking and Ratings of Health Care Among Medicare Beneficiaries Aged 65+

  Patients whose doctors provide advice on quitting smoking are more likely to be satisfied with the care they receive.

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  Upcoding and Anesthesia Risk in Outpatient Gastrointestinal Endoscopy Procedures

  Claims data analysis suggests that physicians may be identifying more patients in the coding system as being at high risk of complications from some outpatient procedures in order to ensure payment for anesthesia services.

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  Medical Device Innovation in the Era of the Affordable Care Act: The End of Sexy

  In this Perspective, the authors explore why medical device innovation has traditionally focused on improving performance, with little regard to cost. They argue that new incentives in the health care sector, accelerated by the Affordable Care Act, will force device manufacturers to embrace "the end of sexy" and redirect investments from the spectacular toward the prudent. They explore consequences for manufacturers, investors, and policymakers.

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  National Patient-Centered Clinical Research Network (PCORnet) Phase I: Final Evaluation Report

  The Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute sponsored the establishment of PCORnet, the National Patient-Centered Clinical Research Network, to improve the efficiency and utility of clinical trials and observational research. This report contains the results of a formative evaluation of PCORnet's implementation, including the development of its governance, data, and research infrastructure; collaboration activity; and stakeholder engagement.

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  Does Targeting Higher Health Risk Employees or Increasing Intervention Intensity Yield Savings in a Workplace Wellness Program?

  This article aims to test whether a workplace wellness program reduces health care cost for higher risk employees or employees with greater participation.

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  Incentives, Program Configuration, and Employee Uptake of Workplace Wellness Programs

  The aim of this study was to determine the effect of wellness program configurations and financial incentives on employee participation rate.

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  Understanding the Relationship Between Incentive Design and Participation in U.S. Workplace Wellness Programs

  We aimed to understand how employer characteristics relate to the use of incentives to promote participation in wellness programs and to explore the relationship between incentive type and participation rates.