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2
Overview of Health Services Research
The field of health services research is just one outgrowth of scientific
discoveries and technological innovations that have, in this century, transformed
the understanding of the determinants of health and disease and allowed health
workers to diagnose, prevent, and treat many conditions that once promised only
death, disability, or discomfort. This transformation in the capabilities of
medical care has provoked complex and continuing changes in the organization,
cost, financing, governance, and social significance of health care in the United
States.
Like higher income and education, greater access to health care has come to
distinguish society's "haves" from its "have-nots." Health insurance has become
the most valued employee benefit and a growing financial worry for many
employers (IOM, 1993b). Efforts to assure universal access have created
periodic upheavals in the political landscape, as have a succession of varied
strategies to control spending on health care. These social, economic, and
political developments have, in turn, helped to influence the direction and rate
of changes in biomedical science and technology. Modern health services
research was essentially born of demands for better understanding of how
services are organized, financed, and delivered and with what consequences.
Recently, the health care system has been dramatically restructuring itself.
Governments and employers have intensified their efforts to direct people into
managed care plans that control patient access to practitioners and services, pay
providers fixed amounts for a defined set of services to a defined set of patients,
and otherwise manage the use and cost of care. Health care organizations are
25
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26 / HEALTH SERVICES SEARCH
consolidating, expanding, shrinking, reorganizing, or otherwise changing in ways
that are varied and often complex, and the power of specific institutions and
professions is in flux. Health services research has played and will continue to
play a central role in helping to document, assess, and explain these changes and
their effects and to inform public and private decisions during a period of rapid
change.
A BRIEF LOOK BACK
Although an extensive historical review was beyond the scope ofthis project,
a brief look back is useful in understanding the field of health services research
as it exists today. Not surprisingly, given the relatively imprecise boundaries of
the field of health services research, any effort to trace its history involves some
subjectivity, especially the further back in time one goes. Although the emphasis
here is on the United States, it is clear that health services researchers from other
countries have advanced the field in general and influenced American
researchers. (The history of health service research education and training
programs is considered in Chapter 4.)
The following historical overview notes several landmarks in the
development of the field, including both advances in methodology and changes
in the problems targeted for study.' It points out some of the contributions of
health services research to policymaking or at least to policy debates. The
review also highlights the critical role that federal funding for health services
research has played in the development of the field.
Before 1965
Early instances of what may be broadly viewed as health services research
tended to involve fairly simple descriptive surveys of personnel, facilities, or
diseases. Starting with Michigan in 1883, states began to require the reporting
of certain infectious conditions, and Congress in 1893 authorized the collection
of such information from states and localities. Private organizations also became
involved, as exemplified in the 1908 Chicago Medical Society birth record
survey of midwifery, the first American Medical Association (AMA) survey of
hospitals in 1909, and the 1914 AMA survey of state boards of health.
Beginning in 1906 in Rochester, New York, dental inspections of school children
'This discussion draws on Somers and Somers, 1961; Anderson, 1968; PSAC, 1972;
Flook and Sanazaro, 1973; NRC, 1977; IOM, 1979; Starr, 1982; Rorem, 1982; Shortell
and Reinhardt, 1992; IOM, 1993b.
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OVERVIEW OF HEALTH SERVICES RESEARCH / 27
generated data that helped build understanding of the prevalence arid variability
of oral disease. These and similar kinds of data collection activities began to
make clear the degree to which disease was associated with poverty. In the
1920s, the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) continued investigations into the
relationship between illness and income.
During the early years of this century, Emest Codman pioneered empirical
studies of the quality of medical care in hospitals. He argued that "hospitals, if
they wish to be sure of improvement, must find out what their results are, must
analyze their results, must compare their results with those of other hospitals"
(Codman, 1914, cited in Fifer, 1990, p. 2943. Codman analyzed 337 cases of
hospital care, identifying errors of knowledge, judgment, and skill. Codman's
analyses and arguments were highly influential on organizations such as the
American College of Surgeons, although a concerted emphasis on evaluating care
by its results or outcomes did not really take hold until relatively recently.
The work of the Committee on the Cost of Medical Care (CCMC) in the late
1920s and early 1930s became an early landmark in health services research, a
truly multidisciplinary project in both its methods and its scope. With a research
budget of $1 million, an astonishing figure for the time ($8.5 million in today's
dollars), the 42-member committee and its 75-person staff produced 27 field
studies and a final report between 1928 and 1932 (CCMC, 1932~.2 The CCMC
studies and associated surveys provided the first extensive investigations of such
matters as the incidence of illness and disability; the levels and kinds of care
involved in treating specific illnesses and the implications for health work force
and facilities planning; the distribution and organization of health care services;
the level and types of health care expenditures; the uneven burden of medical
expenses and access to medical care; and the development of group practice,
prepayment, and other innovations in organizing and financing care. The scope
and depth of the CCMC analyses have, arguably, not been approached again, and
many subsequent analyses have come to generally similar conclusions, even
several decades later.
In the 1930s, the federal Works Project Administration undertook the
National Health Inventory, which was intended both to document health status
in urban areas and to provide jobs for unemployed Americans. Except for
limited state and supplementary studies, nothing as extensive was attempted until
2Six private foundations helped initiate the work of the CCMC: the Carnegie
Corporation, the Josiah Macy, Jr., Foundation, the Milbank Memorial Fund, the Russell
Sage Foundation, the Twentieth Century Fund, and the Julius Rosenwald Fund. Other
organizations, including the AMA, also helped support the study with funding,
information, or other assistance.
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28 / HEALTH SERVICES SEARCH
1956 when the National Health Survey Act (P.L. 84-652) authorized a continuing
survey program supplemented by methodological and special topic studies.
In the private, nonprofit sector, the Health Insurance Plan of Greater New
York and three Kaiser Pennanente regions pioneered health services research in
the group practice setting after the end of World War II (Denser, Shapiro, and
Einhorn, 1959; Greenlick, Freenborn, and Pope, 1988~. Beginning in the 1950s,
some Blue Cross and Blue Shield plans also undertook applied health services
research, for example to understand patterns of hospital use (Koen, 1965; Young,
1965).
One of the early federal government efforts to apply health services research
in a systematic way to a problem in medical care organization came in the 1950s
when funding was provided for internal PHS studies in hospital administration
and for demonstration projects to improve hospital organization and design.
These projects had been authorized by the 1948 Hospital Survey and
Construction Act (P.L. 79-725), more commonly known as the Hill-Burton Act.
In 1959, the Hospital Facilities Study Section of the PHS became the Health
Services Research Study Section. In 1963, the Bureau of State Services in the
Department of Health, Education and Welfare (DHEW) consolidated several
research efforts and began the first organized extramural research program in
community health services. During this period, some health services research
was also being sponsored by the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
Indications that a coherent research field was emerging came with the
creation of organizations, journals, and similar symbols. Within the American
Public Health Association (APHA), the Medical Care Section (established by
1963) included a large contingent of health services researchers. The free-
standing Association for Health Services Research (AHSR) was not, however,
founded until 1981, when researchers recognized the value of having a focused
voice for increased research Finding (Gray, 1992) and a forum for bringing those
with an interest in health services research together to share ideas and research.
Journals launched in the early 1960s included Medical Care (sponsored by
the corresponding section of APHA), Inquiry (created by the Blue Cross and
Blue Shield Association), and Health Services Research (established by Hospital
Research and Education Trust, the research arm of the American Hospital
Association). All are still being published today. In addition, more specialized
journals often publish work that is based on health services research. These
include the Journal of Health Economics, Journal of Clinical Evaluation, Journal
of Quality Improvement, and Journal of Outcomes Management, as well as
prominent clinical journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine and the
Journal of the American Medical Association.
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OVERVIEW OF [IEALTH SERVICES RESEARCH / 29
1965 and After
Federally Sponsored Research
In the 1960s, the federal government launched many significant initiatives
in health care organization and financing, most notably Medicare and Medicaid.
This expansion of government responsibility and spending focused policymakers'
attention on the gaps in their knowledge about health care delivery and financing
and about health behavior. It highlighted the need for efforts to evaluate the
impacts of government programs and the factors contributing to the strengths,
weaknesses, and unanticipated consequences of these programs. In addition,
1966 legislation authorizing the comprehensive Neighborhood Health Center
component of the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) launched a large
number of community health centers and a subsequent OEO effort to evaluate
their community impact.
National Center for Health Services Research. In 1965, the White House
Conference on Health recommended the creation of a National Institute of
Community Health Services to coordinate and stimulate health services research
related to these and other federal health interests. Subsequently, the 1967 Report
to the President on Medical Care Prices recommended a role for a national
center in conducting research on cost containment, prepaid group practice, and
community health care systems (Flook and Sanazaro, 1973~.
In 1967, Congress enacted P.L. 90-174, which authorized the PHS to
undertake a range of research, demonstration, and training activities. Under this
general authority, the Secretary of DHEW established the National Center for
Health Services Research and Development (NCHSR).3 NCHSR consolidated
research activities from several units of DHEW, including those units concemed
with community health service, medical care administration, and hospital and
medical facilities. In addition, NCHSR established several health services
research centers through contracts with academic or other outside organizations,
including Harvard University, the University of California, Los Angeles; the
University of North Carolina; and Kaiser Permanente in Northern and Southern
California. Successor agencies have continued to use the "centers" concept in
various forms with various participants.
fin conjunction with various governmental reorganizations, the National Center was
variously renamed the Bureau of Health Services Research, the Bureau of Health Services
Research and Evaluation, and the National Center for Health Services Research (IOM,
1979~. The National Center was absorbed into the Agency for Health Care Policy and
Research in 1989.
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3 0 / HEALTH SER VICES RESEARCH
After 1969, NCHSR increasingly focused its resources on relatively short-
term research and development (R&D) projects rather than on longer-term
research. The goal was to identify, design, develop, introduce, test, evaluate, and
replicate new health services strategies that met "specified performance criteria
under realistic operating conditions" (Flook and Sanazaro, 1973,p. 158~. The
initial target areas for R&D activities were
physician and dentist extenders,
· cost containment and financing,
quality of care,
medical technology, and
health data systems.
Experience acquired in two of these R&D areas had particular policy
significance in the 1970s. In the quality arena, the Experimental Medical Care
Review Organization program developed and partially tested the structures and
processes for quality assurance that became the basis for the Professional
Standards Review Organization program, created in 1972 mainly for the
Medicare nro~ram. In the data systems area, the Health Services Foundation of
^ r
. · · 1 ~ ~ ~ A: _ ~ ~ : _ ~ ~ 1 ~ 7 ~ ^ +~ ~ ~+
the Blue Cross Association carried out demonstration projects In one ~ ms ~o res~
a uniform hospital discharge data set. This work influenced the creation of a
cooperative federal-state-local health statistics system overseen by the National
Center for Health Statistics, which itself had been created in 1974 (NRC and
IOM, 1992~.
In 1989, NCHSR was absorbed into the Agency for Health Care Policy and
Research (AHCPR). The legislation that established the AHCPR focused the
agency's activities on effectiveness research, technology assessment, and
guidelines for clinical oractice.4
A_ ~ The selection of these areas reflected
policymakers' frustrations with continually escalating health care costs and their
general awareness of two decades of health services research that had (1)
documented wide variations in medical practices (e.g., Wennberg and Gittelsohn,
1982; Wennberg, 1984; Brook, Chassin, Park, et al., 1986), (2) suggested that
some health care services were of little or no value (e.g. Chassin, Kosecoff, Park,
et al., 1987; Eddy and Billings, 1988), and (3) examined various kinds of
economic and organizational incentives to reduce inappropriate variation and
utilization (e.g., Ellwood, 1975, 1988; Eisenberg, 1986; Enthoven, 1988~.
Health Care Financing Administration. The Health Care Financing
Administration (HCFA), which was established in 1974, also developed an
extensive array of research activities, in particular through its Office of Research
4See Gray (1992) for an interesting account of the agency's creation.
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OVERVIEW OF HEALTH SERVICES RESEARCH / 31
and Demonstrations. This office built on the work of the Office of Research and
Statistics in the Social Security Administration, which initially administered the
Medicare program.
In the late 1970s, HCFA was the major funder of research on health
insurance and health care expenditures (IOM, 1979~. The agency also initiated
demonstration projects to examine enrollment, payment, benefit design, and other
issues involved in extending health maintenance organization (HMO) coverage
to Medicare beneficiaries and to test a model of capitated acute and long-term
care for frail older persons with a special emphasis on geriatrics (Langwell,
Rossiter, Brown, et al., 1987; Harrington and Newcomer, 1991; Kane and
Blewett, 1993~.
In addition, HCFA (sometimes building on work initially funded by
NCHSR) has supported research to develop methods to pay for services to
Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries in ways that would encourage cost-effective
health care by discouraging unnecessary use of inpatient care, expensive
technologies, and specialist services. The initials for the resulting tools in
particular, DRGs (for prospective payment for hospitals based on diagnosis-
related groups), RBRVS (for physician payment based on a resource-based
relative value scale), and AAPCC (for a risk-adjusted, capitated payment for
health care plans~have become part of the everyday vocabulary of
policymakers and managers. The development of better methods for adjusting
payments for services to account for a patient's health status or risk of
incurring expenses is a major issue on HCFA's current research agenda.
Department of Veterans Affairs. As directed by Congress, the Department
of Veterans Affairs (VA) has had a health services research and development
office, referred to as HSR&D, since 1976. In 1981, the office was "reoriented
to emphasize health services research as a management tool" to improve health
care for veterans (Goldschmidt, 1986, p. 798~. As part of this initiative, the VA
set up research field offices in each of its six regions. It also established several
Centers for Cooperative Studies in Health Services, which provide support to
investigators planning large-scale studies and promote collaborative use of
common research protocols and data sets. In addition, the VA has funded the
Management Decision Research (:enter, which provides consultation, technical
assistance, and research support to improve system level management and the
capabilities of NIA senior staff. Recently, in conjunction with the Foundation for
Health Services Research, the VA launched a new periodic publication, Forum:
Translating Research into Quality Health Care for Veterans.
Other federal agencies. In addition to the units cited above, several other
federal agencies developed health services research agendas. For example, the
Office of Economic Opportunity initiated (but only briefly oversaw) the national
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32 / HEALTH SERVICES RESEARCH
Health Insurance Study at the RAND Corporation in 1971. This project became
the Health Insurance Experiment (HIE), which "remains one of the largest and
longest-running social science research projects ever completed" (Newhouse and
the Insurance Experiment Group, 1993, p. vii). It continued into the late 1980s
with support from the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and
Evaluation in the Department of Health and Human Services. Several institutes
of the NIH have also supported health services research. Most notable are the
institutes concerned with mental health, drug abuse, and alcoholism and alcohol
abuse, which are currently mandated to set aside 15 percent of their budgets for
health services research. Other parts of the NIH and the Departments of
Agriculture, Defense, Education, and Energy also have sponsored some activities
that could be counted as health services research, although they may not be
explicitly described as such.5
Other Sponsors of Health Services Research
Private foundations, state governments, industry, and other sources have also
supported health services research, although specific data on the level and
distribution of such Finding are largely unavailable. The HSRProj database
maintained by the National Library of Medicine, however, provides some
information on foundation funding of health services research studies. An
analysis of roughly 900 of the 1,200 studies6 listed in the database late in 1994,
showed that six private foundations (the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, W.K.
Kellogg Foundation, Pew Charitable Trusts, John A. Hartford Foundation,
Commonwealth Fund, and Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation) provided
approximately 20 percent ($70 million) of the Finding for the studies listed; the
federal government provided the other 80 percent. HSRProj does not contain
information on the research supported by state governments or industry.
Several private foundations, including those that funded the work of the
CCMC between 1928 and 1932, have a long history of funding health services
research. Examples of major foundation-sponsored research activities include
projects on the appropriateness of medical care (e.g., work at RAND sponsored
by the Commonwealth Fund and others), indicators of health status (e.g., IOM
conferences on advances in health status assessment fended by the Henry J.
5For example, the National Institute of Nursing Research technically does not fund
health services research. Some of the nursing research projects they support do, however,
seek to increase knowledge of the structure, processes, and effects of health
services specifically, nursing services for individuals and populations.
6Data elements were missing on 300 of the files. The committee could not determine
if the missing files contained information on foundation- or government-funded studies.
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OVERVIEW OF HEALTH SERVICES RESEARCH / 33
Kaiser Family Foundation), and regional data projects (e.g., work supported by
the John A. Hartford Foundation).
The committee is aware of few states that undertake or sponsor significant
health services research on an ongoing basis, and much of the research on state
programs and problems is actually sponsored by the federal government or
private foundations. States, however, have undertaken analytic work to support
policy decisions on a variety of health problems or issues including infant
mortality, use of managed care arrangements for Medicaid beneficiaries, nursing
home regulation, substance abuse, and access for underserved populations. They
often contract on an ad hoc basis with consulting firms, research organizations,
or universities for studies of specific programs or issues. Some notable examples
of state-supported health services research include the New York State
Department of Health's analyses of physician-specif~c mortality rates for cardiac
surgery (Hannan, Kilburn, Racz, et al., 1994; Green and Whitfield, 1995) and the
work of the Oregon Health Resources Commission to develop a priority list or
rank ordering of combinations of medical conditions and treatments as a basis for
allocating limited resources for health care (Eddy, 1991~.
In the past 50 years, various private organizations have created (and
sometimes abolished) research arms to conduct both externally and internally
sponsored research. These include professional associations (e.g., the American
Hospital Association, the AMA), insurers (e.g. individual Blue Cross and Blue
Shield plans), community health groups (e.g., Greater Detroit Area Health
Council), and prepaid group health plans (e.g., the Health Insurance Plan of
Greater New York, Group Health Cooperative of Puget Sound, Kaiser
Permanente). The research funding pattern found in early prepaid group practice
plans appears typical of this larger group of organizations. That is, the
organizations provided seed money, but the majority of the funding for research
came from the federal government. Over a 30-year period, for example, Kaiser
Permanente contributed approximately $25 million, or 16 percent, of the $150
million in total funding for its Northwest region's Center for Health Services
Research.
How much private organizations, including competing health plans, will
invest in health services research in the future is an important question. When
they invest, business considerations will guide their choices of topics and their
decisions about making information publicly available. For example, health
plans that support technology assessments to inform coverage or influence
practice patterns may conclude that subjecting their scientific analyses to peer
review and public scrutiny provides essential credibility. Similarly, in some
situations, the competitive advantage is in having early access to information for
decisionmaking, and once this time-limited benefit has been reaped, the
information may be made public. In other cases, commercial considerations may
be weighed differently. For example, some systems to assess severity of illness
have kept some of their algorithms proprietary while making other elements
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34 / HEALTH SERVICF,S RESEARCH
public (IOM, 1989~. Firms that provide services such as technology assessments
on a subscription basis typically have to limit public availability of their analyses
or find other ways of generating income for the activity. Market research on
consumer attitudes and decisionmaking is traditionally proprietary, although
purchasers are now demanding that some information about consumer satisfaction
with competitive health plans be made public.
Public and private universities have received much of the extramural health
services research funds provided by federal agencies, and they also have obtained
research funding from private foundations and industry. In addition, universities
have sometimes provided seed grants or have self-funded a small amount of
health services research from their own resources. The committee was not aware
of any systematic information on the extent of university-sponsored (as opposed
to university-conducted) research.
Several freestanding private research organizations, such as the Urban
Institute, Lewin-VHI, Abt Associates, Mathematica Policy Research, and Battelle
Memorial Institute, have been major recipients of public and private research
funds and have made significant contributions to health services research. The
RAND Corporation, as already mentioned, conducted the multi-million-dollar
national HIE as well as several of the studies of appropriate medical care cited
earlier. As far as the committee is aware, however, these organizations are able
to undertake little if any self-funded research.
HEALTH SERVICES RESEARCH TODAY AND TOMORROW
As a multidisciplinary field, health services research has drawn on and
combined concepts and methods from many disciplines to provide frameworks
for analyzing the structures, processes, and outcomes of health care and for
informing decisionmaking. The agenda of topics for future research is quite
lengthy and challenging. It both builds on longstanding questions about the
availability, effectiveness, and cost of health care and incorporates new emphases
that reflect the complex changes now occurring in the health care system. The
extent to which this research agenda can be implemented depends significantly
on the level and stability of federal funding, which has been and continues to be
uncertain.
The discussion of health research issues below is quite selective, but it
illustrates the central themes of the field: the organization and financing of
health services; access to health care; practitioner, patient, and consumer
behavior; quality of care; clinical evaluation and outcomes research; informatics
and clinical decisionmaking; and the health professions work force. Although
categorizations of research areas inevitably emphasize separation, cross-cutting
inquiry is an important characteristic of the field.
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OVERVIEW OF HEALTH SERVICES SEARCH / 35
Organization and Financing of Health Services
The recent debate over health care reform has highlighted concerns about the
organization and financing of health care that health services researchers have
long studied. Although it may have been largely invisible to the public, the
media, and many political figures, three decades of health service research clearly
contributed to the formulation of recent proposals for health care reform. This
contribution is reflected in the prominence in reform proposals of provisions
involving managed care, consumer choice, outcomes and performance
monitoring, and risk selection in health insurance even though researchers
might sometimes disagree with the policy conclusions set forth in specific
proposals.
Health services research has helped to clarify the features and effects of
health insurance and market-based strategies of health care (e.g., requiring
patients to bear some of the economic cost of their health care decisions and
offering choices among health plans). In particular, it has shed more light on a
dilemma long familiar to actuaries:
that consumers' continuing exercise of
choice in the purchase of health insurance can seriously diminish the degree to
which the burden of health care expenses is shared among the well and the ill
and thus undermine the very notion of insurance. Various studies (many
sponsored by HCFA as part of its effort to direct Medicare beneficiaries into
HMOs) have underscored how the financial benefits to health plans of avoiding
high-risk individuals could be far greater than the rewards from cost-effective
management of health care and have highlighted how difficult it is to compensate
for this risk selection dynamic (IOM, 1993~. Although other considerations and
values certainly shaped the debate over health care reform, concern about
insurance dynamics was central to controversies about minimum or standardized
benefit packages, health insurance purchasing cooperatives, community- versus
experience-based pricing of insurance, statewide reinsurance pools, medical
savings plans, and regulation of marketing practices.
Health services research has illuminated the incentives of traditional fee-for-
service and cost-based mechanisms for paying for health care. It has also
devised tools and techniques that have facilitated the development of various
alternative methods of paying for health services. As described earlier, these
mechanisms include case-based payment for hospital services related to broad
diagnostic groups, relative value scales for individual physician services, and
adjusted per capita payments to health care organizations responsible for enrolled
populations.
As more health services have shifted from the hospital to other settings,
researchers have attempted to evaluate the effects of these shifts on the quality,
cost, and availability of care. Similarly, researchers continue to investigate the
extent to which care provided by dental hygienists, nurse practitioners,
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3 6 / HEALTH SER VICES RESEARCH
occupational therapists, physical therapists, physician assistants, and other "mid-
level" practitioners can safely, effectively, and efficiently substitute for physician
and dentist care. These discussions have focused attention on conceptual and
methodological questions about what constitutes effective care and who
experiences the costs or savings of alternative modes of care.
Access to Health Care
In the health care context, access may be defined as the timely receipt of
appropriate care (IOM, 1993a). From the field's earliest days, access has been
an important focus of health services research, which has drawn attention to
differences in access across income, racial, and other groups. Although it has
helped to identify the cultural, organizational, and other nonfinancial barriers to
access, it has particularly highlighted the financial barriers including the lack of
insurance coverage.
~7
Research has delineated who is less likely to have health insurance and how
coverage affects access to care, utilization of services, and health outcomes. It
has clarified the central role played by employers, especially larger employers,
in insuring full-time, full-year workers and their families. Each year, new survey
results are closely examined for changes in the numbers and proportion of
uninsured in the population. Researchers continue to explore how lack of
coverage affects health, for example, by investigating the impact of cutbacks in
Medicaid coverage (Lurie, Ward, Shapiro, et al., 1984; Hadley, Steinberg, and
Feder, 19919. Such research can inform both the public and policymakers and
shape governmental or political decisions.
Quality of Care
With rising costs have come demands for greater accountability from health
care practitioners and institutions and for monitoring tools or systems that will
document the quality of care. Quality has been defined in another IOM study
as "the degree to which health services tor ~na~v~auats and populations Increase
the likelihood of desired health outcomes and are consistent with current
. .. . . . . . .
professional knowledge" (199Ob. c. 21). Health services researchers attempt to
~ ~ , . ,
define and identify quality problems such as unnecessary or inappropriate care,
underuse of appropriate care, and poor technical or interpersonal care. Drawing
on concepts and techniques from industrial quality management, statistics,
informatics, and operations research, health services researchers have been
investigating strategies for monitoring performance and strengthening
accountability. They have developed methods to measure health outcomes and
to link variations in outcomes to characteristics of health care. Researchers have
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OVERVIEW OF HEALTH SERVICES SEARCH / 37
also sought to educate potential users consumers, purchasers, and
policymakers about the strengths and limitations of specific monitoring and
accountability mechanisms.
One critical need is for continued development and testing of practical and
economical mechanisms for collecting, synthesizing, and disseminating valid,
reliable, and usable health data. For example, researchers have investigated how
"report cards" might be designed and implemented to help purchasers and con-
sumers choose among health plans or providers. Laying a data-driven foundation
for such judgments involves applied, theoretical, and philosophical challenges for
research and policy in both public and private spheres.
A particular challenge involves methods for assuring that performance
comparisons reflect appropriate adjustments for different patient populations.
Despite considerable progress, developing techniques to adjust for differences in
severity of illness, comorbidity, and other factors continues to be among most
difficult technical problems facing health services research today. These
problems are, in many respects, another manifestation of those facing health
plans when they enroll sicker populations that make their costs higher than those
of competitors with healthier enrollees.
Health services researchers can also inform (but not decide) the debate over
the merits of governmental versus market strategies for monitoring and
improving quality. Research in the 1970s contributed to skepticism about the
effectiveness of community health planning, professional review organizations,
and other regulatory strategies for improving efficiency and quality in health
care. Now that market-driven strategies predominate, the focus of research is
shifting. One concern is whether adequate tools and the data are at hand to
assess the effects of a restructured health care system, especially when the
incentives for providing too much care are diminishing and those for providing
too little care are increasing.
Although some role for external monitoring is generally conceded, many
believe that quality improvement must, for the most part, be internally motivated
and managed (IOM, 1990b). That means that large health care organizations
need not only leadership but also people and continuing processes for
establishing objectives, designing strategies for meeting those objectives,
implementing the strategies, collecting and analyzing evidence about their impact,
and redesigning activities as appropriate. In this environment, the boundaries of
research, management, and marketing can become blurred.
j
Clinical Evaluation and Outcomes Research
New medical technologies are often put into practice without valid
evaluations of their effectiveness or their cost-effectiveness (OTA, 19943.
Moreover, some long-standing practices depend on unverified claims of efficacy
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38 / HEALTH SERVICES RESEARCH
(expected benefit under ideal conditions of use) and effectiveness (expected
benefit under average conditions of use). Dissatisfaction with these
circumstances has given rise to clinical evaluative studies and outcomes research
on the benefits and harms of different strategies for preventing, diagnosing, or
treating illness. Relevant studies have focused on the assessment and comparison
of alternative interventions for a given clinical problem and the identification of
short-term and long-term outcomes of interest to patients, practitioners, and
policymakers. In addition, researchers have devised instruments or techniques
for measuring a variety of health outcomes, comparing the performance of health
care organizations, and accounting for patient characteristics and other variables
that may complicate comparisons of outcomes.
The scope of clinical evaluations and outcomes studies is wide. Examples
include evaluations of oral health outcomes in countries with different approaches
to preventing and treating oral disease and organizing oral health services,
assessments of the effectiveness of home-based intervention for people caring for
a family member with dementia, and studies of whether treatment for skin ulcers
in people with diabetes varies according to the type of doctor seen. More
generally, the health outcomes of interest to practitioners, patients, and other
decisions are quite diverse. They include not only mortality and morbidity but
also health status, functional capacities, quality of life, patient and family
satisfaction with health services, and professional satisfaction.
The measurement of health status and functional outcomes comprises a
major area needing further theoretical development, which could include
development of a "production function" for health.
economists, clinicians, and others to collaborate on the design of integrated health
systems that will economically produce the health outcomes that are desired by
patients and their families. There are few data or theories to clarify the trade-
offs between costs and quality.
The results of clinical evaluations and outcomes research may be used in
formulating clinical practice guidelines to assist patients and providers in making
decisions about appropriate medical care (IOM, 19923. More generally,
translating evaluative and outcomes knowledge into improved medical care and
its outcomes will require contributions from other areas of health services
research including those concerned with practitioner and patient decisionmaking,
medical informatics, and quality improvement strategies.
That would require
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OVERVIEW OF [IEALTH SERVICES RESEARCH / 39
Informatics and Clinical Decisionmaking
The country has made large investments in medical information systems that
are supplying health care providers, managers, and researchers with quicker and
easier access to more complete health care information about both individuals
and groups. The information provided by computer-based information systems
is proving particularly useful for clinicians, administrators, and researchers who
are attempting to measure and improve the quality and cost-effectiveness of
health services through better design and management of clinical and
administrative systems. Important challenges for health services researchers,
computer scientists, and others remain in such areas as linking patient records
across inpatient and outpatient care settings; establishing protocols for ensuring
the confidentiality and accuracy of information; and developing more user-
friendly hardware and software for entering, retrieving, or analyzing information.
In these activities, the federally sponsored National Information Infrastructure
initiative will permit a wide variety of parties, including health services
researchers, to transmit, store, process, analyze, and display data in different
forms such as text, still images, sound, and video (Lasker, Humphreys, and
Braithewaite, 1995~.
Clinicians have access to a variety of on-line and other information
resources. They may, for example, subscribe to on-line article retrieval services
such as Medline and Grateful Med. as well as the other specialized medical
information services provided by the National Library of Medicine. They may
also purchase CD-ROM or other software packages that allow them to search the
medical literature for information on specific clinical problems, to locate clinical
practice guidelines, and to work through quantitative algorithms to identify
probabilities of various benefits or harms of alternative clinical strategies for a
given patient's problem. Patients also have access to much of this information
and may use it to guide their own decisions with or without consulting a
clinician. The impact of these information resources on attitudes and behavior
will present new research questions in an area of long-standing interest to health
services researchers.
In addition to providing information, computer-based information systems
can incorporate a variety of tools to assist clinical decisionmaking. These tools
include automatic reminders or alerts that are triggered when certain patient
information is entered or obtained or when certain pharmacy, laboratory, or other
tests are ordered. Thus, a physician or nurse may be reminded that a diabetic
patient is due for an opthalmalogic test or that penicillin is contraindicated for
a patient with a past allergic reaction to the drug. The development and
evaluation of these decision aids pose important opportunities for health services
researchers.
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40 / HEALTH SERVICES RESEARCH
Practitioner, Patient, and Consumer Behavior
Health services and behavioral science researchers have spent many years
exploring health-related human behavior and studying how practitioners and
patients make decisions about health and health care. Investigators continue to
search for the demographic, cultural, economic, and other factors that shape
individual actions such as seeking medical or dental care, selecting among
treatment options, following treatment recommendations, and purchasing health
insurance (or selecting from alternative insurance plans). Much, however,
remains to be learned about ways of encouraging desired patient behaviors and
decisions on such diverse subjects as adherence to dietary protocols for diabetes,
timely and continuing use of preventive services, and appropriate requests for
antibiotics.
Research on practitioner behavior likewise continues. Investigators ask how
education, training, professional socialization, practice environments, economic
incentives, and other factors affect decisions. They raise challenging issues such
as how to reconcile dramatic variations in rates of health care interventions with
the notion that there is a common base of professional knowledge accessible to
all practitioners. Do management models that stress the reduction of such
promise-particularly in a competitive market-to support or
undermine the role of the clinician as an expert agent and advocate for patient
interests? In a restructured health care system, managers can look to past
research on physician responses to economic incentives, guidelines for clinical
practice, data on practice patterns, and other management or policy tools.
variations
rib r- ,
Health Professions Work Force
Some of the most sensitive questions asked of health services researchers
involve the education and supply of health care workers. Are there too many
~ ~ Does the country have too few generalist
practitioners or too many specialists or both? Are health professionals located
nurses or are there too few?
How will the changing medical
force?
appropriately across geographic areas?
marketplace affect demand for health personnel and for neaten pro
education programs? Should the content of medical education change? What
attracts qualified people to particular professions? What are the obstacles to
increased participation by underrepresented minorities in the health care work
1 1 '_ 1_ _ _1 ~ 1_ __~: ~ ~
Efforts by analysts and policymakers to forecast and plan the supply of
health personnel and services have not proved particularly successful (Fell,
Welch, and Fisher, 1993; Kindig, 1994; Capilouto, Capilouto, and Ohsfeldt,
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OVERVIEW OF HEALTH SERVICES RESEARCH / 41
1995; IOM, 1995~. Health services researchers are, however, continuing efforts
to improve their estimating tools (NRC, 1994~. These difficulties and efforts,
which obviously are significant for this study, are discussed further in Chapter
3.
CONCLUSION
The discussion above has several implications for the education and training
issues that this IOM committee was asked to examine. First, health service
researchers face no shortage of important, contentious questions and
methodologic challenges. Second, despite some skepticism, public and private
decisionmakers have for decades been influenced by health services research
(although they may not have known the source for what has become common
knowledge), and they have increasingly looked to it for tools to help measure the
effectiveness of health services and organizations. This implies some trajectory
of rising demand for research and people to design, conduct, and report it.
Third, demands for internal management information and external accountability
should provide employment opportunities for health services researchers as large
medical care organizations, integrated health systems, and accrediting agencies
establish health services research units to provide information and analyses.
Fourth, public resources for health services research are vulnerable when attempts
are made to pare government budgets, which complicates efforts to determine
how many health services researchers should be trained. Fifth, research questions
that have a public good aspect may be less likely be addressed by market
organizations if they cannot readily capture the major benefit of their research
investment.
The next chapter of this report discusses the health services research work
force in more detail. It also presents what the committee learned about public
and private demand for health services research and researchers.
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Representative terms from entire chapter:
services researchers
