[EQ] Health Affairs - Is Health Policy Research Helping Decisionmakers? - The Unhealthy State Of Health Policy Research

Connecting The Ivory Tower To Main Street: 
 Setting Research Priorities For Real-World Impact

It's time to tighten the connections between health services researchers and private-sector decision makers so that research answers private payers' top questions.

by Claudia L. Schur, Marc L. Berk, Lauren E. Silver, Jill M. Yegian, and Michael J. O'Grady

Claudia Schur  is vice president and director of the Center for Health Research and Policy, Social and Scientific Systems (SSS), in Silver Spring, Maryland. Marc Berk is group vice president and directs the Health Policy and Data Analysis Group at the center. Lauren Silver was a research analyst at the center and is now a doctoral student at Emory University. Jill Yegian is director of Research and Evaluation at the California HealthCare Foundation in Oakland. Michael O’Grady is a senior fellow at NORC in Bethesda, Maryland

Health Affairs 28, no. 5 (2009): w886-w899 (published online 11 August 2009; 10.1377/hlthaff.28.5.w886

Available online at: http://content.healthaffairs.org/cgi/content/abstract/hlthaff.28.5.w886

ABSTRACT:
Health care decision makers face increasing pressure to use health care resources more efficiently, but the information they need to assess policy options often is unavailable or not disseminated in a useful form.
Findings from stakeholder meetings and a survey of private-sector health care decision makers in California begin to identify high-priority issues, the perceived adequacy of current information, and preferred formats and other desired attributes of research.
This is a first step in establishing a systematic approach to linking the information priorities of private-sector decision makers with those who fund and conduct research. Health Affairs 28, no. 5 (2009)

The Unhealthy State Of Health Policy Research

Sumit R. Majumdar ¹ Stephen B. Soumerai ^2*
1 Sumit Majumdar is an associate professor in the Department of Medicine, University of Alberta, in Edmonton.
² Stephen Soumerai is a professor in the Department of Population Medicine, Harvard Medical School and Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute, in Boston, Massachusetts.
Health Affairs 28, no. 5 (2009): w900-w908 (published online 11 August 2009; 10.1377/hlthaff.28.5.w900)]

Poor-quality policy research can jeopardize the quality of policies that rely on that research--especially in an intense reform debate.

Available online at: http://content.healthaffairs.org/cgi/content/abstract/hlthaff.28.5.w900

”…Health policies often represent large-scale natural experiments with poorly understood risks and benefits. Unfortunately, researchers often stray from the core principles of study design required to provide valid evidence.

The result is that policymakers and the public do not always know what to believe. We illustrate the problem in several fields, including pay-for-performance, cost sharing, and health information technology policies.

We suggest a few ways to improve health policy research so that evidence can inform policy more often. The way forward should include more credible data for those making the hard trade-offs between cost and quality of care….” Health Affairs 28, no. 5 (2009):

 

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