Managed Care - March 2008 - (Page 29) about their care, medications, hospitalizations, and health status to learn how to improve care and patient outcomes. The researchers will collaborate with the American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association, both of which maintain clinical registries, as well as with government agencies that seek to improve cardiovascular quality of care and outcomes. “One of the unique aspects is that we’re doing this in such a large scale and particularly among diverse, community-based populations,” Go says. “We see this as setting a new way of leveraging everyone’s various investments to get at these answers,” Go says. “That’s the vision we all have.” That is the vision of the HMO Research Network, a collaboration of 15 not-for-profit health plans that allows hundreds of researchers to share their expertise — and the data about their members’ health care — to conduct major research studies. “This is a hidden gem,” says Andrew F. Nelson, MPH, executive director of HealthPartners Re- ing comes from the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention, and other agencies and foundations. Although researchers participating in the HMO RN are affiliated with health plans, the research findings are not proprietary. Rather, the results of the studies are published in peer-reviewed scientific journals or presented at research conferences. HealthPartners, for example, shared its research results in more than 900 publications and presentations in 2006, ranging from posters at the American Diabetes Association’s annual scientific meeting to articles in the International Journal of Cancer. While the health plan-based researchers sometimes pursue studies at the request of their affiliated health plan, they more typically pursue their own research agenda. “We are especially interested in optimizing health and health care through research,” says Nelson, who studies organizational innovation. Katherine Newton, PhD, associate director of external research at the Group Health Center for The cardiovascular network plans to undertake clinical trials, and to do this, it must link the data systems of all the member plans. search Foundation. “Some of the discoveries that happen here have an impact on individual health — for those people that are in the health plans — as well as public health, when that knowledge is shared.” Health Studies, says the health plan-affiliated researchers generally aspire to generate information that can be translated into clinical practice. “We are informed by basic science and the efficacy studies, but our work lives much closer to real world patient care,” she says. While some for-profit insurers have a research capability, they generally apply themselves to concerns specific to their affiliated health plan. In the mid-1990s, Nelson, at HealthPartners, surveyed all health plans across the country and about 50 plans responded to say they conducted research. “When I went to interview each one of them, I learned that about half of that 50 were really not research organizations,” says Nelson, whose study was published in Health Affairs. “They were inside strategic planning groups.” Using two criteria — whether research results were published in the public domain and whether external funding supports specific studies — he found that only 20 health plans made the cut. “Most of the largest and substantial ones are part of the HMO Research Network,” he says. HMO Research Network The HMO RN, established in the early 1990s by researchers affiliated with four health plans — Kaiser Permanente Northwest in Portland, Kaiser Permanente Northern California in Oakland, Group Health in Seattle, and Health Partners in Minneapolis — has grown to 15 members. The network builds on the substantial research capacity of the individual health plans. In most cases, the research enterprise is an independent entity that is hosted by the health plan but receives most of its funding from external sources. For example, Group Health established the Center for Health Studies, which has about 30 researchers and nearly 240 employees, more than 20 years ago. Roughly 10 percent of the center’s budget is covered by Group Health, but its research fund- MARCH 2008 / MANAGED CARE 29
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