Research Library

About 1 million Texans gained health care coverage due to the Affordable Care Act, according to new research by health policy fellows Vivian Ho and Elena Marks. The new findings published in the American Journal of Public Health examined the effects of the ACA’s Marketplace on Texas residents and determined which population subgroups benefited the most and the least.

Previous studies of tobacco policies aimed at reducing hospitalizations may have overestimated the benefits of bans on public smoking and underestimated the benefits of cigarette taxes, according to new research by the Baker Institute, Baylor College of Medicine, Yale University, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality and Brigham and Women’s Hospital. “Public-place smoking bans play a critical role in improving public health, and we are not arguing that smoking bans be lifted in restaurants, bars and workplaces,” said research co-author Vivian Ho, the chair in health economics at the Baker Institute and director of the institute’s Center for Health and Biosciences. “However, policy makers and public health workers must be realistic in understanding the benefits of alternative policy interventions like taxes and bans. We found that raising cigarette taxes can have an immediate beneficial effect in terms of reducing costly hospitalizations. As for smoking bans, while these may eventually lower hospitalizations, our research found no immediate benefit in terms of reduced hospitalizations.”

Insurers and physicians can partner to deliver care more efficiently and save costs, according to a study that examined Cigna’s Collaborative Accountable Care initiative’s partnership with the Medical Clinic of North Texas.

Little is known about regional variation in cancer treatment and its determinants. In this publication, authors compare rates of adherence to treatment guidelines for elderly patients across Texas and whether local specialist supply is an important determinant of treatment variation.

State-based Medicaid programs have begun using All Patient Refined–Diagnosis-Related Groups (APR-DRGs) to determine hospital reimbursement rates. This study examined how well APR-DRGs reflect admission costs for childhood cancer chemotherapy to inform clinicians, hospitals and policymakers in the wake of policy changes.

Current medical research and literature may be overemphasizing the role that hospital volume plays in patient outcomes, according to a study co-authored by health economics fellow Vivian Ho.

Health care providers add multiple processes to the care of complex cancer patients, believing they prevent and/or ameliorate complications. However, the relationship between these processes, complication remediation, and expenditures is unknown.

This study aimed to develop a systematic approach to classifying childhood cancer-related admissions in administrative data into categories that reflected clinical practice and predicted resource use.

Errors in surgical care for cancer patients may seem infrequent, but the costs associated with them are extremely high.

Data on revenues by payer type are used to identify the determinants of rising hospital prices in Texas between 2000 and 2007. By Vivian Ho, Jerome Dugan and Meei-Hsiang Ku-Goto.