Melinda K. Abrams, M.S.
Title:
Vice President, Patient-Centered Coordinated Care Program
Organization:
The Commonwealth Fund
Melinda K. Abrams, vice president at The Commonwealth Fund, directs the Patient-Centered Coordinated Care program. Since coming to the Fund in 1997, Ms. Abrams has worked on the Fund's Task Force on Academic Health Centers, Commission on Women's Health, and most recently, the Child Development and Preventive Care programs. She played a lead role in conceptualizing and launching the Fund's Assuring Better Child Health and Development (ABCD) initiative, which awarded grants to state Medicaid programs to encourage innovation in the financing and delivery of preventive and developmental services provided to low-income, young children. Ms. Abrams sits on a number of national committees, including the Board of Managers of TransforMED, the PCMH Advisory Committee for the National Committee for Quality Assurance, and two Medical Home Expert Panels for the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). In addition, she is a peer-reviewer for the Annals of Family Medicine. Ms. Abrams holds a B.A. in history from Cornell University and an M.S. in health policy and management from the Harvard School of Public Health.
Fund Publications by Melinda K. Abrams
Related Programs
Related Grants
One tool that holds promise to improve the coordination of patients’ health care is the "care coordination agreement"—a formal, written arrangement between clinicians that defines responsibilities for the coordination of a patient's care. Emerging evidence suggests that these agreements improve timely access to specialty care services, speed feedback to primary care providers about their patients' hospital stays, and improve discharge planning. This project will support research into how independent primary care practices construct and implement care coordination agreements and how useful they find them to be when collaborating with specialty care practices, hospitals, home health agencies, and nursing homes. The findings will help providers use these agreements more effectively and could facilitate implementation of accountable care organizations and bundled payment systems that rely on well-coordinated care.
In April 2008, The Commonwealth Fund launched a five-year initiative to transform 68 safety-net clinics in Colorado, Idaho, Massachusetts, Oregon, and Pennsylvania into patient-centered medical homes. A team at the University of Chicago has begun to monitor the clinics' transformation and will soon be evaluating the effectiveness of this ambitious initiative by comparing the new medical homes' performance on clinical quality, patient experience, clinician experience, cost savings, and efficiency with that of other health centers. In the evaluation's first year, the researchers administered and analyzed the baseline survey of clinic directors, initiated analysis of Medicaid claims data to assess baseline quality and efficiency, and worked closely with the Fund and the initiative's leadership to ensure that the evaluation is feasible and coordinated with program implementation. To ensure timely dissemination of findings, the evaluation team, beginning as early as 2010, will begin publishing baseline results. Over the course of the study, the team also will prepare case studies of successful clinic strategies, policy briefs, and journal articles aimed at policymakers and health center leaders.