ANN ARBOR, Dec. 15 – Across the region, clinics, hospitals, and other health care providers have been working hard to improve care while they also rein in skyrocketing costs. Health reform supporters have sought to craft health reform legislation that would encourage just this kind of innovation.
But so far, only a handful of examples – notably Minnesota’s Mayo Clinic or Pennsylvania’s Geisinger Health– have been cited as models.
To ensure that the stories of other health care innovators are heard, the Public Interest Research Group in Michigan (PIRGIM) and the U.S. Public Interest Research Group (U.S. PIRG) contacted health care innovators in the Midwest region.
A resulting briefing paper, Health Care Innovators and Health Care Reform (PDF), available on the PIRGIM website, details case studies of three Midwest health care innovators’ achievement of lower costs through higher quality. After each case study, the authors explore provisions of health reform legislation before Congress that would encourage or replicate those reforms.
“For communities around America struggling with rising costs and uneven delivery of health care, the innovators discussed in this report offer something truly valuable: a path to lower costs by improving, not sacrificing, quality of care,” said Larry McNeely, U.S. PIRG’s Health Care Advocate, who helped write the paper.
To download a PDF of Health Care Innovators and Health Care Reform, click here.
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The Public Interest Research Group in Michigan is a non-profit, non-partisan public interest advocacy organization. U.S. PIRG is the federation of state Public Interest Research Groups.
