Laura Keohane recently received two grant funding notices. Laura will lead a TennCare-funded evaluation of whether quality reporting and value-based payment measures have changed health care use and quality for patients who require ventilator and tracheostomy services. TennCare is one of the first Medicaid programs to implement these measures for this high-cost, high-need population. Collaborators on the project include David Stevenson, Wes Ely, Matthew Mart, Shiyuan Zhang, and Nicholas Sinclair.
Additionally, with new National Institute on Aging funding designated specifically for Alzheimer’s disease research, Laura and colleagues will examine the prevalence and incidence of Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias in the members of the Southern Community Cohort Study (SCCS). Study goals include analyzing disparities in dementia related to race, income, educational background, and other social risk factors. Sayeh Nikpay, David Stevenson, and Melinda Buntin will serve as co-investigators.
Stacie Dusetzina received funding from the Commonwealth Fund and the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society to study the relationship between specialty drug prices, treatment uptake, and health outcomes for Medicare beneficiaries. This work will be used to bolster state and federal efforts to manage prescription drug prices and to identify gaps in Medicare coverage policies for Part D enrollees prescribed specialty drugs.
John Graves was awarded an R01 on the implications of provider network design for access, affordability and competition in health insurance markets. The grant will apply novel network analytic methods to understand the degree to which different insurers’ provider networks overlap both within and across markets (e.g., marketplaces, Medicaid, Medicare Advantage, etc.). This new knowledge explores what this means for consumer choice, prices, selection, etc. They will also be developing novel measures that can be used to promote better regulatory approaches to network adequacy in an era of increasingly narrow provider networks.
Carlos Grijalva has been awarded a five-year federal grant to train investigators in Learning Healthcare Systems research, aimed at improving patient outcomes and the community’s overall health. The T32 postdoctoral training grant from the U.S. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality will support establishment of the Vanderbilt Patient, pRactice Outcomes and Research in Effectiveness and Systems Science (PROgRESS) Training Program.