AHRQ to fund Centers of Excellence for putting best practice to work

The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) plans to fund three Centers of Excellence to study how high-performing healthcare systems promote evidence-based practices in delivering care. The centers will identify the characteristics of health systems that successfully disseminate and apply evidence from patient-centered outcomes research, and analyze the connections between successful dissemination of patient-centered outcomes research, patient health outcomes and effective use of resources. 

AHRQ Director Richard Kronick PhD, made the announcement at AcademyHealth’s Annual Research Meeting in Minneapolis.

The three grants will begin in September and provide approximately $52 million over five years to study how complex delivery systems disseminate evidence-based findings and provide lessons learned to inform the dissemination of findings in other settings. 

“New evidence is valuable only if it is used,” said Kronick. “We expect this effort will give us a better understanding of how successful healthcare delivery systems disseminate new evidence so we can enable the rapid adoption of best practices throughout the healthcare system and improve patient outcomes.”

The three Centers of Excellence will identify, classify, track and compare healthcare delivery systems to understand the organizational and environmental factors affecting the use of evidence-based medicine. The effort is part of the agency’s ongoing work to accelerate the dissemination and implementation of patient-centered outcomes research findings into practice. It is also tied to the wider Department of Health and Human Services delivery system reform initiative to encourage better care, smarter spending and healthier people.

At Dartmouth College, Elliott Fisher, MD, MPH, in collaboration with the University of California at Berkeley, Harvard University and the High Value Healthcare Collaborative will use mixed methods involving existing and ongoing claims-based data, conduct a national survey of healthcare organizations and systems to understand the inner workings of systems, and in particular how market and organizational factors influence the implementation of biomedical, delivery system, and patient engagement innovations.

At the National Bureau of Economic Research, David Cutler, PhD, and Harvard University in collaboration with the Health Research & Educational Trust and the Network of Regional Healthcare Initiatives will create a large national database to identify health systems in the United States and their characteristics and outcomes, as well as the evolving consolidation and integration of systems over time, and to use those data to study health systems nationally, with a focus on cancer care, pediatric healthcare delivery, dialysis and post-acute care.

At the RAND Corporation, Cheryl Damberg, PhD, in collaboration with Pennsylvania State University, will examine health systems in five regions with the goal of understanding the role of incentives, use of health IT and organizational integration within systems and its impact on performance and evidence dissemination.