Research Syntheses to Inform Medicare’s Future

On January 8, 2004, AcademyHealth held a working invitational meeting, sponsored by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) and The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Changes in Health Care Financing and Organization (HCFO) initiative, to inform the ongoing debate about the future of the Medicare program. Meeting participants developed research synthesis questions and identified research gaps.

During the meeting; chaired by Robert Reischauer, president of the Urban Institute, participants developed and refined questions on topics identified by current and former administration and congressional staff. The topics included benefit design and cost sharing, markets and private health plans, financial and non-financial incentives for quality, and beneficiary education and information. The participants included both researchers and policymakers (both public and private) with extensive knowledge of Medicare. Participants also discussed priority target audiences for research syntheses as well as dissemination, translation, and impact assessment strategies.

Another important focus of the meeting was to refine a process to identify policy topics and create scopes of work for research syntheses. The work completed on identifying research synthesis questions are the beginning steps in a series of actions that include developing scopes of work, producing research syntheses and translation documents, disseminating the findings to the appropriate audience in a format that is accessible and timely, and assessing the impact of this process.