Business Advancement Center for Health Research

Rapid learning during a public health emergency: COVID-19 related medication treatment patterns in Medicare

Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality

This research project aims to understand how the rapid flow of information during the COVID-19 pandemic influenced medication treatments. Over the next four years, the study will investigate the factors driving the adoption and de-adoption of various COVID-19 treatments by healthcare providers. By analyzing prescription data for Medicare patients and considering demographic information, state policies, and hospitalization rates, the team seeks to identify what influenced clinical decisions during the pandemic.

The project will examine the use of treatments such as hydroxychloroquine, chloroquine, azithromycin, corticosteroids, and ivermectin. The goal is to improve the safety and equity of healthcare practices by understanding how evidence and data influenced treatment choices. Insights from this research could lead to better outreach and education to ensure that healthcare providers can quickly adapt to new evidence and provide safe, effective care. 

Social Bonds as a Pooled Financing Mechanism to Address Social Drivers of Health Equity

Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Systems for Action

The Business Advancement Center for Health’s initial research initiative is a three-year project awarded in November 2021 from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Systems for Action program. It is focused on designing and evaluating a novel financial instrument to align Medicaid managed care organizations (MCOs) and establish sustainable funding for targeting social influencers of health (SIH), such as housing and food insecurity. This project will design and evaluate a social bond to align MCOs to efficiently invest in SIH needs and to curate long-term, sustainable funds that can be equitably distributed to the needed interventions. A social bond raises funds from investors to support projects that create demonstrable positive social impact and will improve allocation of resources that address racial and other dimensions of health equity so that interventions can reach all individuals in need of these critical services regardless of payer source.  

Medical Reversals: De-Implementing Ineffective and Unsafe Treatments

National Institute of Health, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality

Understanding whether and how robust clinical evidence is integrated into practice is critical from the perspectives of: a) improving patient safety and health outcomes; b) designing programs and policies to accelerate the use of high value, effective treatments and abandon less effective and harmful treatments; c) containing health care costs by allocating limited health care budgets to their most effective use. In most circumstances, physicians and healthcare delivery organizations (HCDOs) are the key agents in determining whether a patient receives a given medical treatment. However, physician and HCDO integration of clinical evidence into practice are not well studied or understood. In general, the term "integration of evidence into practice" could mean both the adoption of new treatments and the de-implementation of established treatments based on new evidence related to effectiveness or safety. In this proposal, we will focus on the latter. The primary focus of this research is to understand how physician networks, HCDOs, and the physician market environment influence the de-implementation of ineffective and unsafe treatments in practice. Read more about the project's specific aims and view the team's publications. 

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