The Fund supports independent research on health and social issues and makes grants to improve health care practice and policy. We are dedicated to helping people become more informed about their health care and improving care for vulnerable populations such as children, the elderly, low-income families, minorities, and the uninsured.
Project Title: National Dissemination of a Program for Improving Management of Acute Conditions in Nursing Homes
Principal Investigator: Joseph G. Ouslander, M.D.
Date Awarded: April 10, 2012
Award Amount: $260,000
Some 200 facilities in Massachusetts and 35 in New York City have received INTERACT training, with several hundred more homes nationally deploying at least some of the component interventions. This project will build on this success by refining the program and helping to spread it to nursing homes throughout the United States.
Project Title: Educating Key Audiences About How the US Health System is Reforming
Principal Investigator: Barry A. Scholl
Date Awarded: April 10, 2012
Award Amount: $200,000
This special communications authorization will support a range of activities over the coming year to provide traditional and nontraditional Commonwealth Fund audiences with comprehensible information about the many ways in which U.S. health care is changing.
Project Title: Online Resources for Educating Key Audiences About Policy and Delivery System Reforms
Principal Investigator: Barry A. Scholl
Date Awarded: April 10, 2012
Award Amount: $100,000
This special authorization will support the development and dissemination of a greater number of these features over the coming year, a critical period for health reform.
Project Title: Enhancing the International Program's Communications and Publications Capacity, Year 4
Principal Investigator: Bradford H. Gray, Ph.D.
Date Awarded: April 10, 2012
Award Amount: $82,916
To strengthen the impact of The Commonwealth Fund’s international program and spark creative health policy thinking in the United States, this grant will support an external contractor working with Fund staff to produce a series of issue briefs highlighting innovations in health policy and practice from abroad that might be transferable to the United States.
Project Title: Evaluating a Comprehensive Primary Care Medical Home Payment Model in Albany, N.Y., Phase 2
Principal Investigator: David Bates, M.D., M.Sc.
Date Awarded: April 10, 2012
Award Amount: $371,661
This evaluation will assess changes in quality, utilization, and health care costs in the 24 primary care sites in the Albany region. In addition, the evaluation team will complete the analysis of the five original sites included in phase 1.
Project Title: Cost Analysis of a Nurse Care Management Program for High-Risk Medicaid Patients in Montana
Principal Investigator: Stephen Seninger, Ph.D.
Date Awarded: April 10, 2012
Award Amount: $155,488
With a preliminary analysis of the program indicating cost savings after six months, this project will support an external evaluation over a full year to determine the longer-run impact on health care utilization, quality of care, and costs.
Project Title: Examining a Safety-Net Health System’s Transformation into an Accountable Care Organization
Principal Investigator: Karen Hacker, M.D., M.P.H.
Date Awarded: April 10, 2012
Award Amount: $148,557
This grant will support an in-depth case study of CHA’s approach to delivery system and payment reform, documenting the organization’s progress in becoming an ACO, clarifying the challenges for safety-net systems, and identifying lessons to help these providers deliver efficient, patient-centered population-based care.
Project Title: Promoting Integrated Care for Dual Eligibles, Phase 1
Principal Investigator: Penny Hollander Feldman, Ph.D., and Carol Raphael, M.P.A.
Date Awarded: April 10, 2012
Award Amount: $318,084
This project will seek ways to expand the capacity and scalability of existing well-performing integrated managed care plans that serve dual eligibles.
Project Title: Helping Dually Eligible Beneficiaries with Mental Illness Receive Better Care Coordination
Principal Investigator: Richard G. Frank, Ph.D., M.A.
Date Awarded: April 10, 2012
Award Amount: $145,202
Dually eligible beneficiaries with severe and persistent mental illness incur especially high costs. A team of Harvard researchers will study state-based programs that have lowered costs and improved care for special-needs patients by emphasizing better coordination of patients’ services. As part of this work, the researchers will estimate the expected outcomes, costs, and savings from different combinations of coordination models, payment schemes, organizational structures, and targeting strategies.
Project Title: Harkness Fellowships in Health Care Policy and Practice, 2013-14
Principal Investigator: Robin Osborn
Date Awarded: April 10, 2012
Award Amount: $1,472,370
Support for a 16th class of Harkness Fellows in Health Care Policy and Practice will allow The Commonwealth Fund to continue developing promising policy researchers and practitioners from Australia, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom.
Project Title: Assessing the Characteristics and Performance of Accountable Care Organizations and Their Potential for Spread, Phase 1
Principal Investigator: Arnold Epstein, M.D., M.A., and Ashish Jha, M.D., M.P.H.
Date Awarded: April 10, 2012
Award Amount: $363,260
A major aim of health reform is the promotion of care delivery systems that are accountable for quality and costs. With this project, The Commonwealth Fund will embark on a multiyear effort to track patterns of integration and health care utilization, cost, and quality among these emerging entities.
Project Title: Transforming Safety-Net Clinics into Patient-Centered Medical Homes, 2012-13
Principal Investigator: Jonathan R. Sugarman, M.D., M.P.H.
Date Awarded: April 10, 2012
Award Amount: $1,620,000
In 2009, 65 safety-net health centers in Colorado, Idaho, Massachusetts, Oregon, and Pennsylvania were selected to participate in The Commonwealth Fund’s Safety Net Medical Home Initiative, which assists clinics in becoming patient-centered medical homes that achieve benchmark levels of clinical quality, efficiency, and patient experience.
Project Title: International Data Tracking Project: Comparison of Health Care Costs in the U.S. with Those in Selected Countries
Principal Investigator: Elias Mossialos, Ph.D.
Date Awarded: April 10, 2012
Award Amount: $189,750
Comparisons of health system spending between the United States and other industrialized countries reveal the U.S. to be an extreme outlier, far outspending any other country. This project will generate baseline health system cost data, to be updated on a biennial basis, comparing U.S. spending with spending in selected countries within the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development on hospital costs for 25 procedures, hospital administrative costs, a market basket of the top 50 pharmaceuticals, a set of high-volume/high-cost medical devices, and physician specialty incomes.
Project Title: Web Publishing Alliance with Health Affairs
Principal Investigator: Susan Dentzer, M.A.
Date Awarded: April 10, 2012
Award Amount: $200,000
This grant will provide the Health Affairs with an additional year of funding for Web operations as well as the development of new media and social-networking capabilities online.
Project Title: International Lessons for the Financial Sustainability of Health Systems
Principal Investigator: Elias Mossialos, Ph.D.
Date Awarded: April 10, 2012
Award Amount: $199,540
This grant, the fifth in a series to the London School of Economics and Political Science, will support the work of an international advisory group that will identify and compare best practices for maximizing value and containing costs, and then assess their potential applicability to the United States.