Our Work
We have content expertise in several key areas, including:
- Health Care Reform
- Accountable Care
- mHealth
- Consumer Engagement
- Performance Improvement
- Predictive Modeling
- Behavioral Economics
- Public Reporting
White Papers
Reinventing Health Care: The Barriers to Innovation
The vision of a highly networked system, organized around personal health records that deliver a patient’s entire medical history at the point of care, has gone unrealized outside of a handful of integrated delivery systems that collect and mine patient data for quality improvement purposes. Read more →
Using Behavioral Economics to Advance Population Health and Improve the Quality of Health Care Services
Why do many people fail to exercise in spite of the well-known benefits of doing so, while others skip medications that could prevent serious illness and improve their quality of life? Why do some physicians stick to their usual care practices despite ample evidence of better approaches? Behavioral economists, who rely on psychology rather than conventional economic principles to explain human behavior, have a few theories.
Case Histories
The Veterans Health Administration: Implementing Patient-Centered Medical Homes in the Nation’s Largest Integrated Delivery System
The Veterans Health Administration embarked on an ambitious three-year plan to build patient-centered medical homes in more than 900 primary care clinics across the nation. Its model organizes care around an interdisciplinary team of providers who work together to increase access and clinical effectiveness by identifying and removing barriers to high-quality care. Read more →
The ECHO Effect Spreads to Address Superutilizer Patients
The University of New Mexico team behind Project ECHO, a program that brings skills and niche expertise to medically underserved communities, is taking on perhaps its greatest challenge: improving care and lowering costs for “superutilizer” patients, many with serious mental illnesses or addictions in addition to their physical health problems. Read More >>>>
Interviews
Using Machine Learning to Sort Through Treatment Options Interview with Stephen Gold, Vice President of IBM Watson Solutions
“Watson … isn’t programmed; it’s taught. We will give it a question and give it an answer and do that over and over so that it continually gets smarter. In essence, it uses machine learning and various algorithms to advance its understanding based on new information, iterations, and outcomes.” Read more →
Blog Posts & Multimedia Essays
The Commonwealth Fund’s WhyNotTheBest.org: Building a Platform for Health System Improvement
Development of The Commonwealth Fund’s WhyNotTheBest.org—a free tool with which to benchmark hospital performance on measures of quality and safety, outcomes, and costs—began with a question. We asked: if the U.S. health care system is not the “best in the world,” as has beenamply demonstrated, what will it take to get us there? Read more →
All Health Care Is Local: The Power of Community to Drive Improvement
In many communities across the United States, poverty is a depressingly reliable indicator of health outcomes and health system performance. But there are some fascinating exceptions to this general rule, as The Commonwealth Fund’s Scorecard on Local Health System Performance revealed. Read more →