Healthcare Delivery Systems Analysis

The Network for Regional Healthcare Improvement and Regional Health Improvement Collaborative (RHIC) members in Colorado (CIVHC), Massachusetts (MHQP), and Oregon and Utah (Comagine Health) partnered with the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and Harvard University in the Comparative Health System Performance Initiative Study funded by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ).

Accomplishments:

The RHICs developed methods to comparatively study eight quality measures across systems and geographies, in addition to cost across geographies by standardizing measurement for disparate regional databases.
They also developed a Uniform Data Structure (UDS) file format that can be scaled across populations, measures, and research dimensions to provide a consistent method of producing comparable findings across regions.
Their research was published in the May 2019 issue of The American Journal of Managed Care: “Producing Comparable Cost and Quality Results from All-Payers Claims Databases.”

“Regional health improvement collaboratives are trusted, neutral conveners with rich access to, and unique knowledge of local data. This project exemplifies the power of bringing RHICs together and demonstrating how their regional APCDs [All payer claims database] can be used to assess healthcare performance variation across states and regions producing data that can be used to affect healthcare policy.”

Craig Brammer, President and CEO, NRHI

“While the CO APCD [Colorado all payer claims database] is uniquely suited to inform health care system opportunities within Colorado, there is so much more we can learn from the data when we’re able to make state by state comparisons. Each state has unique healthcare market dynamics, demographics and public policies in place, and having the ability to make meaningful comparisons can help further Colorado’s efforts towards creating a high-value system... Identifying a standard way to evaluate data between states is foundational to being able to learn from each other and make informed decisions at the state level."

Ana English, President and CEO, CIVHC

NRHI PARTNERS PARTICIPATING IN HDSA

The work continues...

NRHI and the RHICs are continuing to explore key issues to better understand delivery system variation across and within states. Current topics of study include:

Understanding pediatric care utilization and quality in Colorado
Examination of the relationships between patient experience, care quality, cost and utilization in Massachusetts
Examination of the impact of health system structure on healthcare costs (resource utilization and price) in Oregon and Utah.

Other key work: The states assisted in administering The Dartmouth Institute’s National Survey of Healthcare Organizations & Systems (NSHOS) to health systems, hospitals, and practices in the 4 states to support the Dartmouth Center of Excellence in their goals to better understand strategies and tactics that are most important and most effective at improving health system performance.Results will be used to further the goals of this project.

This project is supported by grant number U19HS024072 from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the political views of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.

Read Comagine Health’s most recent white paper
“Total Cost of Care: Is Health Care Resource Use and Price Influenced by Primary Care Clinic Affiliation with a Health Care Delivery System?”