Health Outcomes

This report examines how integrated care models served full-benefit dually eligible Medicare‑Medicaid beneficiaries in 2021. It compares three types of integrated plans—PACE, FIDE‑SNPs, and D‑SNPs—to standard Medicare Advantage plans, with a focus on hospitalizations, emergency department visits, nursing facility use, home‑ and community‑based services, and mortality.

Children, youth, and families have unique health needs, which set the foundation for health across the life course; chronic conditions now affect nearly one in three U.S. children, with disproportionate prevalence in those enrolled in Medicaid and CHIP.

In Fiscal Year 2025, OS-PCORTF projects and other OS-PCORTF initiatives collectively enhanced the data infrastructure available for patient-centered and comparative clinical effectiveness research (CER) across national and HHS health objectives.

This report is to serve as a data source guide that helps policymakers and researchers understand the current data infrastructure landscape for SCD-focused health outcomes research. Specifically, the goals are to identify existing SCD data sources and data dashboards as well as key considerations to enhance data collection and use.

This Issue Brief explores opportunities that technology-enabled care (TEC) offers to help meet patient and provider needs for high-valued coordinated care to improve health outcomes. It explores literature surrounding existing available TEC options, as well as economic and payment issues that influence whether this is taken up.

To help patients make informed choices about their care, the United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is improving the quality and accessibility of data needed to determine which treatments and care options work best.

We evaluated both the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services Innovation Center (CMS Innovation Center) models and the Medicare Shared Savings Program (MSSP) and found that they have generated gross savings for all beneficiaries in the Traditional Medicare program while demonstrating positive impacts on selected quality measures.

This Issue Brief investigates how health insurance coverage, as well as healthcare access and affordability, has changed in recent years, with an emphasis on policies implemented from 2021 to 2024. Over 300 million Americans now have health insurance coverage. The U.S. uninsured rate has fallen significantly over the past four years.

This ASPE issue brief lays out a proposed comprehensive analytic framework to fully evaluate the impact of the CMS Innovation Center’s efforts on the Medicare program and the broader health care system as a whole to test innovative payment and service delivery models that reduce program expenditures while preserving or enhancing the quality of care.

This research report describes patterns in insurance coverage and uninsurance rates in rural and urban areas, reviews non-financial challenges in accessing care faced by many rural residents, and describes disparities in health outcomes between urban and rural areas.