Quality of care is the extent to which all individuals receive the right care, at the right time, every time. RAND has been conducting research on measuring and assessing quality of health care for 40 years, and RAND teams developed many of the quality measures being used around the world today. In 2005, RAND analysts produced the first national report card on quality of care in the United States.
Early indications suggest that value-based incentives are leading to changes; however, incentives remain small, potentially limiting their effectiveness in driving the significant changes needed to derive large improvements in performance.
Testimony submitted to the Senate Committee on Veterans' Affairs on April 10, 2019.
Technology-enabled collaborative learning and capacity-building models connect generalist providers, often located in remote areas, with specialist teams that help train these providers so that they can deliver care for conditions that generalists might not otherwise feel adequately prepared to handle. This report focuses on the quality of evidence for the effectiveness of such models and describes ways to improve measurement of effectiveness.
This study provides information on the experiences of a national sample of chiropractic patients in the United States with chronic pain.
This study determined the minimum sample sizes needed for reliability with two key health-related quality-of-life outcome-based performance measures among older adults. These estimates can guide the design of future patient-reported outcome-based performance measures.
To accurately identify "high-performing providers", a standard definition of high-performance and an agreed-upon approach to measurement are necessary.
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services recently launched its Quality Payment Program (QPP), which changes how physicians are paid under Medicare. Significant concerns have been raised about the ability of small rural medical practices to successfully participate in the QPP. RAND researchers interviewed physicians on the initial implementation of the QPP to understand flexibility provisions and to inform future federal rulemaking.
This report describes an extension of the RAND Corporation's evaluation of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration's Primary and Behavioral Health Care Integration (PBHCI) grants program. The current study extends previous work by investigating the impact of PBHCI on consumers' health care utilization, total costs of care to Medicaid, and quality of care in three states.
On October 30, 2018, the RAND Corporation convened a Technical Expert Panel (TEP) web meeting to gather input on analyses that could be conducted to further enhance the Medicare Advantage (MA) and Part D Contract Star Ratings program.
The objectives of this study were to describe quality of care for unhealthy alcohol use among patients visiting primary care settings and to determine whether better quality of alcohol care was linked to reduced alcohol consumption 6 months later.
Morphine equivalent daily dose thresholds are a promising policy tool, but there is a lack of consensus about how to use the thresholds and what the threshold level should be.
Adding e-discontinuation functionality has the potential to help reduce medication errors and take fuller advantage of e-prescribing technology. Prescribers need to be able to e-discontinue prescriptions, just as easily as they can e-prescribe them.
This article explores the potential of systematically elicited narratives about experiences with outpatient care to enrich quality improvement.
Beneficiaries who are dually enrolled in Medicare and Medicaid are less likely to be enrolled in Medicare Advantage (MA) plans that perform well in the MA Star Rating program than non–dually enrolled beneficiaries. The authors identify the types of services that MA plans implement to meet the needs of dually enrolled and other high-cost, high-need beneficiaries, as well as the types of resources needed to implement these services.
This study describes the characteristics of a large sample of chronic low back pain and chronic neck pain patients in the United States who use chiropractic care for their chronic low back pain and chronic neck pain.
Our results suggest that the omission of MAT in the current version of the HEDIS measure "Initiation and Engagement of Alcohol and Other Drug Dependence Treatment" results in meaningful measurement error.
This research sheds light on how collaborative care (CC) may work to increase abstinence in a sample of primary care patients with opioid and alcohol use disorders (OAUD).
A one-day AHRQ conference led to a consensus-driven research agenda aiming to better understand and respond to the short- and long-term emotional impact of harmful events on patients and families.
This article describes preferences for survey instruments on health-related quality of life and subjective well-being among adults with spinal cord injury, and compares perspectives on the instruments between the United States and the United Kingdom.
On May 31, 2018, the RAND Corporation convened a Technical Expert Panel (TEP) to gather input on analyses that could be conducted to further enhance the Medicare Advantage (MA) and Part D Contract Star Ratings program.
