The National Institute for Health Care Management (NIHCM awarded four new grants totaling $270,000 to support investigator-initiated health services research. The winning studies were selected based on their potential to impact future policymaking, strength of design, and efficiency of budget.
The first grant titled “Physician Practice Styles and Overuse of Healthcare Services” awarded to researchers from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center www.mskcc.org will explore physician practice patterns for cancer services that tend to be overused to understand whether overuse is pervasive across the medical decisions of individual physicians or more limited to specific services.
The second grant titled “Do Higher Priced Providers Deliver Higher Quality Care? An Analysis of the Price/Quality Relationship Using HCCI Data” was awarded to researchers from Yale University www.yale.eduu, Carnegie Mellon University www.cmu.edu, and the London School of Economics www.lse.ac.uk.
This study will analyze the relationship between various measures of provider quality and the prices received from private payers, building on prior research that does not show direct association between quality and prices in Medicare.
The third grant titled “How are Physician Referral Networks Affected by Physician Practice Ownership and Limited Coverage Network Insurance Products?” was awarded to researchers from Boston University www.bu.edu. They are going to study how referral patterns are influenced both by the ownership structures of physician groups and hospitals and by limited-network insurance plans.
The last grant titled, “Physician Practice Organization and health Care Delivery and Costs” was awarded to researchers from Stanford University www.stanford.edu, and Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis www.iupui.edu.
This study will examine how physician practice consolidation into multi-specialty groups affects care delivery, spending and quality for Medicare patients as well as PPO prices for the privately insured.