HealthEconomics.Com - The Resource for Health Outcomes Professionals

Job Title Company

Associate Director, Health Economics RTI International

Health Economics & Outcomes Research Scientist (New York or Chicago) EPI-Q, Inc.

Research Scientists - Center for Health Outcomes Research United BioSource Corporation

Senior Associate, Health Policy Evaluation and Analysis VNAA

Sr. Health Outcomes Scientist Eli Lilly and Co.

About the SF-36

Annotated bibliography of 10 articles related to the SF-36, the"short-form" health status questionnaire developed for the Medical Outcomes Study.

Advantage Suite®

From Medstat, Web-enabled decision support tool linked to a comprehensive, integrated warehouse of medical claims and encounter data, pharmaceutical drug utilization, eligibility information, and performance measures.

AHRQ Registries for Evaluating Patient Outcomes

Comments on the draft handbook from UBC (United Biosource Corp).

Alegent Health P4P

Discusses recent initiative by employer to return money to employees for improving health. Demonstrates a pay for performance (P4P) initiative and an employer who is interested in indirect and direct medical cost management.

Ambulatory Care Experiences Survey

Overview, how to use, etc.

Asthma QOL questionnaires

Downloads and links for Juniper's AQLQ, miniAQLQ, and ACQ

Asthma QSPAN questionnaires

AHRQ Asthma Processes of care questionnaires

Benefit Design Modeler for Employers

Modeling tool — Medstat Modeler® — allows you to confidently make benefit design decisions specific to the appropriateness of your employee base. The basis for the model is data from the Medstat proprietary MarketScan® Database, a market-leading benchmarking and research database. Using actual claims cost and use experience, industry group, enrollee age/gender, and geographic distribution, we tailor the modeling results to your specific healthcare experience.

Book: Measuring Employee Productivity: A Guide to Self-Assessment Tools

Known as "The Gold Book". Excellent publication on how to choose tool, evaluation of validity/reliability, copies of instruments, all available in downloadable PDF for $49

Book: Platinum Book

How to assess health and productivity management programs (work productivity impairment due to health). This is an excellent resource for anyone engaged in employer-demonstration projects.

Case Studies on Health and Productivity Management

Excellent training and education tools from the Benfield Group

Cost effectiveness thresholds

Information on the threshold values used in CHOICE analyses for the relative CE of an intervention in current international dollars of 2000 for 14 countries. Following the recommendations of the Commission on Macroeconomics and Health, CHOICE uses gross domestic product (GDP) as a readily available indicator to derive the following three categories of cost-effectiveness: Highly cost-effective (less than GDP per capita); Cost-effective (between one and three times GDP per capita); and Not cost-effective (more than three times GDP per capita)

Daily Diary of Events and Behaviors (DDEB)

A measure designed to assess the everyday impact on the family of living with a child who has Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).

Determinants of health economic decisions

Summary of presentation by Dr. Daniel Kahneman at 2007 ISPOR meeting. Covers the value of QALY

Disease Management ROI: Benchmarks, Metrics, and Case Studies for Success

Join the Managed Care Information Center and experts on disease management analysis for a discussion about disease management and ROI in this special 90-minute audio conference which took place in May 2007 with Ron Z. Goetzel, Ph.D. Director, Cornell Institute for Health and Productivity Studies, Matthew McGinnis,Sr. Director, Ctr for Health Research, Healthways, and Thomas W. Wilson, Ph.D. Epidemiologist Trajectory HealthCare. Cost is $247 for CD + materials

Employer Manufacturer Relationships

Report on the Health and productivity management relationship works from the Benfield Group

Employer Market Overview and Trends

From the Benfield Group: Employer market overview; Key employer market trends; Employers' role and influence on pharmacy decisions

Employer Trends - 2006

Employer Market Intelligence. Click here to see how to obtain updated reports from the Benfield Group.

EORTC QLQ-C30

QOL in cancer patients

EQ-5D - homepage

EQ-5D is a standardised instrument for use as a measure of health outcome. Applicable to a wide range of health conditions and treatments, it provides a simple descriptive profile and a single index value for health status that can be used in the clinical and economic evaluation of health care as well as population health surveys. EQ-5D has been specially designed to complement other quality of life measures such as the SF-36, NHP, SIP or disease-specific measures.

Expansion of Quality of Care Measures (Q-SPAN)

AHRQ Project designed to strengthen the science base of quality measurement while expanding the scope and availability of validated, ready-to-use measures. Q-SPAN builds on past work in quality measurement by public and private organizations through eight cooperative agreements to develop and test additional clinical performance measures for specific conditions, patient populations, and health care settings.

Functional Limitations Profile (FLP)

A health-related quality of life measure that is a British Version of the Sickness Impact Profile, translated into British English and rescored using British Weights.

Getting It Right: Designing Outcomes-Based Physician Incentive Compensation

Is there a "right way" to get physician buy-in of pay-for-performance (P4P)? What makes for an effective outcomes-based incentive program? Listen to this executive-level teleconference on CD-ROM. This special program was sponsored by Managed Care Information Center. This conference was held on July 28, 2005. Cost $149 for CD + materials

Global Quality Assessment Tool for Managed Care

AHRQ/QSPAN assessing the quality of care delivered in managed health care plans, this project will examine care delivered to men ages 18-50 and women age 50 and over. Conditions considered: Twenty-seven conditions for new indicator development (e.g., anxiety, colorectal cancer, prostate cancer, menopause); 12 to be adapted from the HCFA study (e.g., alcoholism, breast mass, diabetes, low back pain).

HCMS Human Capital Management Services

Health information service business; has database with Payroll Data; Attendance, Absence and Disability Data; Workers Compensation Data; Health Plan Data, including Drug Safety Data, when available Individual Health & Productivity Data. Also provides consulting services to employers not large enough for database services, and includes technical assistance in health benefits design and implementation, and human capital risk management training.

he P4P Potential: Overcoming the Challenges and Recognizing the Opportunities

The Managed Care Information Center editorial team analyzed the growth and adoption of healthcare provider – physician and hospital – pay-for-performance programs around the country

Health and Productivity Questionnaires

Download version

Health and Productivity Toolkit

Excellent overview for evaluating health and productivity management programs

Health Benchmarks, Inc.

Provides health and information consulting services to pharmaceutical companies, health plans, physician networks, and employers. HBI initially developed its core business around the development of population-based programs and conducting HEDIS® data management. Today, HBI has web-based reporting and benchmarking tools.

Health Plan Wellness and Health Improvement Programs: What’s Working Today to Achieve Member Commitment and Participation

Discover what’s working in health plan wellness and health promotion programs, award winning and unique programs, best practices, ROI, and lessons learned in this special audio conference, “Winning Ideas in Health Plan Wellness and Health Improvement Programs: What’s Working Today to Achieve Member Commitment and Participation.” The program was held Tuesday, November 15, 2005.

Health Risk Assessment

Source for questionnaires

Health Utilities Inc.

Access to HUI utility (preference-based) measures of HRQOL

HealthAct Inc.

Licenses the Child Health Questionnaire and a series of condition-specific surveys to measure quality of life for patients and their families. HealthActCHQ provides surveys and services to document patient-reported outcomes.

Health-Related Quality of Life Measurements

How to Use Articles About HRQOL by Gordon Guyatt (how to ascertain change, etc.)

HEDIS Compliance Audit

Audits or audit reviews for health plans and physician organizations (reporting entities). Licensed by the National Committee for Quality assurance (NCQA) to perform HEDIS Compliance audits, our trained professionals, located throughout the United States, have extensive experience with commercial, Medicare, and Medicaid data in both health plans and provider organizations.

High Performance Networks by Health Benchmarks

Increasingly, health plans and employer coalitions are developing tiered provider networks in an attempt to rein in the rising costs of health care. High-value providers are recognized and assigned to different tiers based on whether or not they meet certain standards of utilization and quality, and patients are offered price differentials such as different co-payments and benefit/premium differentials for visiting doctors in these high-performing tiers. n combination, HBI's cost of care measures and clinical quality indicators form the necessary foundation for identifying cost-effective providers or medical care to support plan’s in developing their performance tiers.

Hopecube.com

Hopecube.com is a site dedicated to help people with health issues find information, support, and hope. Form social networks and support groups, write daily diaries and ask health questions about a variety of problem issues.

Hospital Caliper

From Thomson Medstat provides a trusted single source point of reference to easily see which hospitals in an area perform best on key NQF-endorsed measures and determine how local hospitals compare on key effectiveness and efficiency measures.

HRQOL Determinants: A paper by Lyttkens "Why the Economotrician is in Good Spirits"

This is a paper in progress that blends health related quality of life with health economic theory. Very intriguing.

Infosoft Research

Provides online satisfaction surveys, HR surveys and custom research; For web-based and other administration methods.

Integrated Research Network from HealthCore

Multidimensional platform which is structured to combine aspects of traditional retrospective and prospective study designs with data obtained from physicians' offices, diagnostic laboratories and additional administrative data sets in the pursuit of "real world solutions" to clinical research and health outcomes research studies. Clinical studies span the full range of methodology from simple surveys, to registries, to complex phase 2-4 pharmacologic studies.

International Organization for Standardization

KDQOL: Kidney Disease QOL Qx

Short and long form Qx developed by the Kidney Disease Quality of Life Working Group with support from Amgen.

Managed Care: What's Ahead, a Forecast

Join thought leaders in the managed care industry to hear different perspectives of the challenges ahead in the 90-minute audio conference, “Forecast: What’s Ahead for Managed Care.” Sponsored by The Executive Report on Managed Care and the Managed Care Information Center, this executive-level program was held on February 23, 2006. Cost is $227 for CD + materials

Mapi Research Institute

Collaborative research in the field of patient-reported outcomes (PRO) since 1994. Links to questionnaires and linguestics translations

Medical Outcomes Trust

Dedicated to improving health and health care by distributing standardized, high quality instruments that measure health and the outcomes of medical care.

Medical Outcomes Trust QOL Questionnaires

Access the instruments and information about them through here: Generic Instruments include BASIS-32; Child Health Questionnaire (CHQ; Child Health and Illness Profile--Adolescent Edition (CHIP-AE); Duke Health Profile (DUKE); London Handicap Scale (LHS); Sickness Impact Profile (SIP); Quality of Well-Being Scale (QWB); Primary Care Assessment Survey (PCAS); SF-36 Health Survey (SF-36® Health Survey); SF-12 Health Survey (SF-12® Health Survey) Condition-Specific Instruments include Adult Asthma Quality of Life Questionnaire (AQLQ); Pediatric Asthma Quality of Life Questionnaires (PAQLQ); MOS-HIV Health Survey (MOS-HIV) Migraine Specific Quality of Life (MSQOL); Migraine Specific Quality of Life Questionnaire (MSQ v.2.1); 24-Hour Migraine Quality of Life Questionnaire (24-Hr-MQOLQ); St. George's Respiratory Questionnaire- UK Parent Version (SGRQ-UK) Seattle Angina Questionnaire (SAQ); Urinary Incontinence-Specific Quality of Life Questionnaire (I-QOL-US)

MediQual

Clinical information business of Cardinal Health. Using laboratory results data coupled with data from billing systems, both of which are available electronically in most hospitals, achieves much greater accuracy in assessing quality and outcomes. It also provides information about the risk adjusted outcomes in a form that is readily comparable across hospitals.

Medstat Core Measures

Delivers timely, efficient, and cost-effective reporting to JCAHO, CMS, and other data aggregators.

Medstat Modeler

Medstat Modeler assists customers in making accurate, efficient decisions by quantifying the cost impact of proposed plan design changes, including co-pay, premiums, covered services, and benefit limits on costs to the organization and enrollees. * Modeler data is populated with information from the market-leading benchmarking database, Medstat MarketScan® * Provides an intuitive Excel-based interface and generates presentation-ready reports * Helps customers improve their capabilities to forecast expenses and project costs to compare budgets in determining variances * Can identify cost impacts of multiple scenarios in minutes, and run multiple design changes simultaneously

Medstat Modeler - Health Plans

Modeler can help you make accurate decisions quickly to more effectively impact your benefit management activities. Its easy-to-use interface allows you to efficiently establish a reliable baseline of healthcare experience from which alternative plan designs can be modeled. You can identify the cost impact of multiple scenarios in minutes with Modeler, and run multiple design changes simultaneously. The flexibility and speed of Modeler provides a cost-effective alternative to hiring consultants. And its intuitive design will provide your own staff analysts with a robust tool for making the best modeling decision for your organization.

MEPSnet: Interactive statistical tool

Developed to provide immediate access to data from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS) in a nonprogramming environment. Available online, MEPSnet is quick and easy to use, allowing even novice users the ability to generate national estimates in a few seconds.

Mergers and Acquisitions in the Managed Care Industry: The Trends, Issues and Impact

Hear from speakers at three leading investment banking companies that focus on merger & acquisition services in the healthcare industry for both providers and payors to learn the current trends in M&A’s, what are the issues, what are state officials' issues, what acquirers are seeking in a suitable fit, the strategic buyer's interests, and, finally, the impact on providers in a consolidated market.

National Committee on Quality Assurance

Developers of HEDIS

Obesity and Weight Loss QOL Instrument

Weight-specific instruments intended to be used together to assess obesity specific symptoms and quality of life, general functional status and well-being, and person-specific preference measurement.

P4P and Public Reporting Help Quality Improvements

Hospitals engaged in both public reporting and pay-for-performance achieved modestly greater improvements in quality than did hospitals engaged in only public reporting, according to a study appearing in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Patient Reported Outcomes Working Group

Link to the ISPOR Working Group. Goal is to increase the appropriate use of methods for measurement of patient preferences and values in outcomes research and the use of this information in health care technology assessment.

Pay for Performance Reporter

Costs $250-$350, once-monthly, put out by MCIC.

Pay for Performance: Lessons Learned

CD Rom + materials from a discussion of past successes and the challenges ahead in the 90-minute audio conference, “Pay-For-Performance: Lessons Learned and Future Predictions.” This executive-level program took place on March 29, 2007. Cost is $247

Pediatric Economic Database Evaluation

Paediatric Economic Database Evaluation (PEDE) Project was conceived as part of a research program in paediatric health economic methods.In Phase 1, a comprehensive database of over 750 paediatric economic evaluations published over a 20-year period was created. Phase 2 examined key trends in publication. With this database available, an important objective was to evaluate the quality of published paediatric economic evaluations to reveal methodological limitations of existing approaches. In Phase 3, the Paediatric Quality Appraisal Questionnaire (PQAQ), a 57-item paediatric-specific quality appraisal instrument, was developed through a systematic process of item selection, validity and reliability assessment and pre-testing. The PQAQ was used to critically appraise the quality of the paediatric health economic literature in Phase 4.

Perceived Quality of Life Scale (PQOL)

Generic instrument for assessing perceived quality of life among adults.

Performance Expert

Performance analysis and reporting tool, combines robust analytics, clinically driven severity adjustment, benchmarking comparatives, and potent reporting to provide insights needed to focus and drive performance improvement efforts.

Performance Measurement

Medstat designs reliable, evidence-based measures of costs, access, and quality of care to analyze provider and health plan performance. We assist in developing related data collection processes and systems that ensure data validity and comparability. We integrate, validate, and analyze the resulting data, we build market-wide norms, and we evaluate performance against those norms. We also lead and coordinate regional coalitions of employers, providers, and plans, contributing to the success of their performance-incentive and quality improvement programs.

Performance Measures from HBI (Health Benchmarks)

Includes Physician Clinical Quality Indicators; Physician Cost of Care Measures; Performance Reporting Website

Performance Scoring by Health Benchmarks

To ensprovide the most useful information in a succinct, meaningful manner, HBI will assist by either developing and mass-producing provider scorecards, or guiding the proper development of scorecards within our clients'own corporation.

Primary Care Assessment Survey

51-item patient-completed questionnaire designed to operationalize formal definitions of primary care including the definition posted by the Institute of Medicine (IOM) Committee on the Future of Primary Care. The survey measures 7 defining characteristics of primary care through 11 summary scales, including detailed measurement of the doctor-patient relationship (communication quality, patient trust, physician knowledge of patient, interpersonal treatment, relationship duration).

PROMIS

Patient-Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System (PROMIS) initiative stablishes a collaborative relationship between NIH and individual research teams through a cooperative agreement (U01) mechanism. The broad objectives of the PROMIS network are to: * Develop and test a large bank of items measuring patient-reported outcomes * Create a computerized adaptive testing system that allows for efficient, psychometrically robust assessment of patient-reported outcomes in clinical research involving a wide range of chronic diseases * Create a publicly available system that can be added to and modified periodically and that allows clinical researchers to access a common repository of items and computerized adaptive tests. The network will collaborate on the collection of self-reported data from diverse populations of individuals with a variety of chronic diseases, using agreed-upon methods, modes, and questionnaires.

PROMIS Domain Analysis

on Pain, Fatigue, Physical Functioning, Emotional Distress, Social Health. PROMIS is an NIH+7 institution collaboration with the intent of developing a database of psychometrically sound outcomes instruments. This link gives you the stat analysis on these domains. Items were subjected to IRTanalyses by PROMIS psychometricians.

QALYs: Will they survive

ISPOR QALY Consensus Development Workshop Building a Pragmatic Road: An ISPOR Development Workshop on Moving the QALY Forward (By Invitation Only) November 7–8, 2007 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA

QOL questionnaires

From University of Toronto

Quality Indicator Project

Mission is to develop health care provider performance indicators, to determine the validity of the indicators in the field, and to educate participants as to the applications of the indicators in identifying potential opportunities for improvement.

RAND 36-Item Health Survey 1.0

Based on the SF-36, this page tests the feasibility of collecting health outcome information via the WWW.

Rapid Assessment of Physical Activity (RAPA)

A short 7-item questionnaire designed to allow clinicians to monitor physical activity levels among their patients ages 50+. Mexican-Spanish and Vietnamese versions are currently under development. Please contact the Instrument Distribution Coordinator for information regarding the RAPA.

Return On Investment (ROI) of Physician assessment and pay-for-performance programs

Return on investment analysis on nascent, or mature, physician measurement programs by Health Benchmarks

Rhinoconjunctivities QOL Questionnaire

Links/downloads

SERMO: Online Physician Community

Physicians around the nation exchange the latest medical insights with each other and improve patient outcomes - 24/7. Used for epidemiology, patient outcomes, surveys, etc.

SF-12, SF-36, SF-8, and Headache Impact Qx

Access questionnaires to use, scoring demonstrations, etc.

Urinary Incontinence Quality of Life Scale (I-QOL)

A self-report Quality of Life measure specific to urinary problems that can be used to assess the impact of urinary problems and their treatment.

WHO Health and Productivity Questionnaire

Overview, downloads, references

Work Limitations Questionnaire

Overview, how to obtain, etc.

Work Productivity Questionnaire

Validation process document

World Health Organization Quality of Life Instruments (WHOQOL)

Generic Quality of Life Scale developed through the World Health Organization. The SeaQoL Group is the location of the US WHOQOL Center and distributes the US English translations of the WHOQOL-100 and WHOQOL-BREF.

Youth Disability Screener (YDS)

A 4-item measure for obtaining self-reported disability status from youth ages 11-18

Youth Quality of Life Instruments (YQOL)

The YQOL includes both generic and condition-specific measures. Has an obesity component too.

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