The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) operates the Quality Improvement Organization (QIO) Program to ensure and improve the quality of health care for Medicare beneficiaries. This report presents the results of an independent evaluation of the ninth scope of work, QIO Program,...

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) operates the Quality Improvement Organization (QIO) Program to ensure and improve the quality of health care for Medicare beneficiaries. This report presents the results of an independent evaluation of the ninth scope of work, QIO Program,...

Safety-net providers serving the nation's 39 million uninsured residents are vulnerable organizations even in good economic times, yet efforts to monitor their capacity have been limited. This study of the safety net in five cities found that capacity was strained for specialty services and...

This study compares key patient outcomes at Brand New Day, a Medicare SNP for dual eligibles with severe mental illness, under two alternatives—routine care (services routinely provided at the plan before the study) and enhanced care (more frequent or more intensive services)—for...

This paper identifies opportunities for using multifactorial designs and electronic health record data to evaluate quality improvement efforts in physicians' practices. Examples include using multifactorial designs to evaluate clinical decision support features and studying components of a...

The study findings suggest that only one of the interventions tested (more frequent routine contacts and medication review) appeared to have led to improved outcomes, but the lack of consistency of favorable findings across outcomes for this intervention, and the anomalous finding for the...

Using data from patients surveyed after primary care provider visits, this working paper found patients had favorable perceptions of electronic health records (EHRs). Patients believed that EHRs improved the quality of care, and most were not concerned with confidentiality of records. Adopters'...