Recommendations For Enhancing Quality Improvement Efforts In Health Care

A newly released paper from the Urban Institute reviewed the evolution of QI initiatives, the current evidence about whether QI interventions work, QI’s promise for the future, and how to help it find success in health care. The paper, which was funded by the Robert Wood Johnson's Quality/Equality Portfolio, made numerous recommendations geared towards a variety of stakeholders that can improve quality improvement efforts and thus, lower costs while improving patient care.

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Patient-Centered Medical Home Poised to Transform Health Care

A recently released policy paper, written by the Urban Institute’s Robert Berenson, Kelly Devers and Rachel Burton, examines the promise of the medical home model of care and concludes it has the potential to transform health care delivery, but that organizations promoting the model should tread carefully. The paper reviews the positive feedback it has received but warns that providers, policy-makers and others should wait to implement it before evidence of the model’s effectiveness is available.

The paper notes that stakeholder organizations have yet to agree on a definition and set of standard components for a practice to be considered a medical home. The model is currently being tested in dozens of pilots nationwide that could answer questions about whether medical homes actually improve the quality of care and the health outcomes of patients, which components of the medical home model have the largest impact on these outcomes and what levels of reimbursement are needed to get providers to engage in the desired activities.

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