Support of Health System Performance Tracking

Under a renewed contract with Issues Research, Douglas McCarthy will continue to serve as Commonwealth Fund senior research director, overseeing the Tracking Health System Performance program’s two related components:

1. Health system performance scorecards. A hallmark of the Fund’s public‐reporting efforts for nearly a decade, these resources help track changes in health care quality, access, efficiency, equity, and outcomes at the local, state, and national levels and among specific populations such as high‐need, high‐cost patients.
2. Case study research. Case studies describe the experiences of health care organizations and identify factors that enable or hinder high performance.

Renewal of the contract with Westat will support David Radley’s activities related to data procurement, analysis, and methodological development for the scorecards and other health data reporting tools. Supported by dedicated Westat analytic and data management staff, Radley and the team will be able to increase their focus on implementing scorecard enhancements, such as further analysis of the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey. Scorecard activities in the next year will include updates to core health system tracking performance metrics, derivative analyses of state and local variations, and analyses of care experiences of high‐need, high‐cost patients.

The scorecards and case studies produced by the team inform policymakers, health system leaders, the media, and the public. The scorecards are consistently among the Fund’s most‐used publications; the 2016 Scorecard on Local Health System Performance received nearly 10,000 page views in the two weeks following its release.