More Than Half of Individual Health Plans Offer Coverage That Falls Short of What Can Be Sold Through Exchanges as of 2014

More Than Half of Individual Health Plans Offer Coverage That Falls Short of What Can Be Sold Through Exchanges as of 2014

May 23, 2012 - More than half of Americans who have health coverage through the individual insurance market are in plans that would not meet the standards for "essential benefits" set by the Affordable Care Act. Most people enrolled in employer group plans, however, have more comprehensive coverage with less cost-sharing. Read ›

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 ›

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 24, 2012

Raising Medicaid Primary Care Rates: Next Steps for States ›

The Department of Health and Human Services recently released long-awaited proposed regulations for implementing the Affordable Care Act's Medicaid primary care rate increase. This post provides takeaways from the proposed rule and suggestions for implementation. Read ›

Newsletters

International Health News Briefing

May 2012 ›

Using mobile devices to access patient records in Canada; qualified nurses, pharmacists, and midwives can now prescribe painkillers in U.K.; 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. Through 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 ›