Reducing Health Care Disparities with Health Insurance and Medical Homes

Reducing Health Care Disparities with Health Insurance and Medical Homes

May 17, 2012 - A new analysis of the Commonwealth Fund 2010 Biennial Health Insurance Survey demonstrates that when low-income adults have both health insurance and a medical home, they are less likely to report cost-related access problems, more likely to be up-to-date with preventive screenings, and report greater satisfaction with the quality of their care. Read ›

Recommended Core Measures for Evaluating the Medical Home

Recommended Core Measures for Evaluating the Medical Home

May 16, 2012 - A new Commonwealth Fund data brief describes how more than 70 researchers came together as part of the Patient-Centered Medical Home Evaluators' Collaborative to identify a set of standardized measures to assess patient-centered medical homes. Watch a recording of a May 16 webinar to hear the authors discuss their consensus process and core measure recommendations. Read ›

Durable Medical Equipment, Home Health Are Big Reasons for Health Care Use Variation

Durable Medical Equipment, Home Health Are Big Reasons for Health Care Use Variation

May 8, 2012 - The Commonwealth Fund-supported author of this Health Affairs article examined variations in beneficiaries' use of 13 health care services in 60 communities to investigate: discernible patterns; the extent of variation in service categories across sites; and which services vary to the extent that they account for disproportionate geographic variation in total use. Read ›

Explaining High U.S. Health Care Spending

Explaining High U.S. Health Care Spending

May 3, 2012 - This Commonwealth Fund analysis of 13 industrialized countries finds the U.S. spends far more on health care than any other country. However this high spending cannot be attributed to higher income, an older population, or greater supply or utilization of hospitals and doctors. Instead, the findings suggest the higher spending is more likely due to higher prices and perhaps more readily accessible technology and greater obesity. Read ›

Commonwealth Fund Leadership Transition

Commonwealth Fund Leadership Transition

January 9, 2012 - Read a message from Samuel C. Fleming, chair of The Commonwealth Fund Board's Search Committee for The Commonwealth Fund's next president. Read ›

Health Policy Reform

Visit the Health Reform Resource Center

Use our timeline and interactive tool to explore the provisions and regulations of the Affordable Care Act. New: state insurance exchange rules. Read ›

Health Care Delivery

Accountable Care Organizations: Commonwealth Fund Resources

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has released its final regulations for accountable care organizations (ACOs), which are groups of health care providers that provide coordinated care. Check out our ACO Resource Page for Commonwealth Fund publications and blog posts on ACOs. Read ›

Blog

May 18, 2012

Measuring the Success of Medical Homes: Recommendations from the PCMH Evaluators' Collaborative ›

There is an urgent need for rigorous data to strengthen the evidence base of the medical home model. In an effort to harness and share lessons from the many disparate medical home pilots and evaluations under way, The Commonwealth Fund established the Patient-Centered Medical Home Evaluators’ Collaborative in 2009. Read ›

Newsletters

HEALTH POLICY WEEK IN REVIEW

May 14, 2012 ›

Primary care doctors who treat Medicaid patients get a two-year boost; HHS gives the green light to 26 projects stressing health care innovation; millions of small businesses qualify for premium tax credit; and more. Read ›

Quality Matters

April/May 2012 ›

Can health care price transparency help promote high-value care? Read ›

Multimedia

Multimedia · All Multimedia ›

Community Counts: The Local Scorecard

Podcast · All Podcasts ›

Why Accountable Care Is a Game Changer

"Accountable care is a shift in focus from payment for units of service to payment for taking good care of patients over time," explains The Dartmouth Institute's Elliott Fisher, M.D., in this episode about accountable care organizations, or ACOs. Though interviews with Dr. Fisher and Commonwealth Fund experts, Sandy Hausman explores how ACOs will change the way we think about care and how we pay for it.

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HEALTH SYSTEM DATA CENTER

Interactive U.S. Map Offers State Rankings and Results

Visit an interactive map to view state-specific rankings and results compared to benchmarks, and to view the number of lives and dollars each state could save by achieving benchmark levels of performance. You can also compare states and generate custom tables and bar charts. Go ›

INTERNATIONAL HEALTH POLICY CENTER

Browse Publications and Create Custom Charts

Visit the new International Health Policy Center to browse content by country or topic and create custom tables and charts using data from our international health policy surveys from 2006 to 2011. Go ›

A Health Care Quality Improvement Resource

WhyNotTheBest.org is a quality improvement resource for health care professionals. It offers a powerful benchmarking tool to compare hospitals on more than 100 measures of health care quality and safety, patient experiences, and outcomes, as well as an interactive map to explore health system performance at the national, state, and regional levels. Go ›