The Peterson Center on Healthcare www.petersonhealthcare.org, a non-profit organization has awarded the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) www.healthdataa.org, a $628,000 grant to analyze the drivers of healthcare spending and to identify future trends to guide efforts to improve health outcomes and bend the cost curve.
“We know the U.S healthcare system does not deliver the outcomes we should expect given what the nation spends, so we need to understand at a much finer level what exactly is happening in the system,” said Jeffrey D. Selberg, Executive Director of the Peterson Center on Healthcare.
The funding will be spent to analyze three phases:
- Researchers will look at the findings from the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) Study www.healthdata.org/gbd and the Disease Expenditure (DEX) www.healthdata.org/dex to find the causes of illnesses, risk factors, and to examine the types of care that can lead to high healthcare costs. These costs will be compared across three primary payers such as public insurance, private insurance, and out-of-pocket private spending
- Changes in public and private health expenditures will be broken down into changes in demography, epidemiology, utilization, and for what has the greatest impact on spending
- A forecast of healthcare spending will be developed through 2040 based on alternative scenarios
IHME will benchmark its forecasts for private and public healthcare spending to current forecasts, including those published by the Congressional Budget Office www.cbo.gov and the Office of the Actuary at CMS www.cms.gov.
The analysis from this project will be published through the “Peterson-Kaiser Health System Tracker” www.healthsystemtracker.org, an initiative with the Kaiser Family Foundation to monitor current trends and drivers of healthcare quality and cost.