Evaluating the effectiveness and return on investment of an intervention to reduce unnecessary medical services

This project will study the effectiveness of the California Quality Collaborative's 2008 program to improve cost efficiency by learning how to: (1) identify unnecessary variation in the use of emergency rooms and in the prescription of generic drugs; (2) identify workable interventions in quality improvement; and (3) effectively engage physicians to make changes in patterns of resource use. This project is one of 12 that the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is supporting to respond to heightened concern across the country about the ballooning costs and poor quality of health care. In April 2010, the Foundation issued a broad call for ideas from the field to rein in spending without jeopardizing patient care. It received 277 proposals and, based on input from independent reviewers, selected the most novel ideas and those most likely to engender far-reaching change. These grants, totaling $3.1 million, address issues in value-based purchasing, quality improvement support, public reporting of provider performance, and data collection and aggregation for performance measurement. This specific project will: (1) evaluate the effectiveness of the improvement approach used; and (2) conduct a return-on-investment analysis of the program as a whole. The goal is to determine whether the approach is effective in building organizational capacity to reduce unwarranted variation and should be spread to other organizations.

Grant Details

Amount Awarded $219,053.00

Awarded on: 10/15/2010

Time frame: 11/1/2010 - 3/31/2012

Grant Number: 68281