A new brief from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality describes the importance of quality improvement in primary care and outlines external supports—which can be used alone or in combination—to assist primary care practices in improving quality.

The objective of this study was to examine the perspectives of primary care physicians who serve CSHCN on changes they and their practices made in order to achieve the highest level of NCQA PCMH-recognition. Specifically, the study used information from physicians in pediatric and family...

This opinion piece critiques the large body of geographic variations research, finding much of it flawed or uninformative for policy. The author posits that wide geographic variation in fee-for-service Medicare spending and care delivery could be mitigated by reforming the payment system to...

Multidisciplinary, multi-institutional collaboration has become a key feature of comparative effectiveness research (CER), and CER funders have made promotion of these types of collaboration an implicit, and sometimes explicit, goal of funding. An important challenge in evaluating CER programs...

As part of the evaluation of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) investment in comparative effectiveness research (CER), Mathematica developed a conceptual framework to guide future efforts to assess the impact of CER. In addition, we explored methodological challenges related to...

This article describes American Reinvestment and Recovery Act comparative effectiveness research (CER) data infrastructure (DI) investments and identifies facilitators and barriers to implementation. We reviewed original project proposals, conducted an investigator survey, and interviewed...

To improve health outcomes, clinicians and patients must have evidence-based information available to help them make informed decisions, the knowledge and skills to use this information, and positive attitudes about the value of using comparative effectiveness research (CER) in decision making....

Using data on elementary and middle school math and reading outcomes for Pennsylvania students, this working paper found that school value-added provides little useful information for comparing the general leadership skills of different principals when these comparisons include some principals...