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Highlights
Aaron McKethan Appointed Senior Policy Fellow

Dr. Aaron McKethan, Duke-Margolis' first Scholar in Residence joins Duke-Margolis on April 17 as Senior Policy Fellow. He will be based out of the North Carolina office and report to Dr. Mark McClellan and will be working closely with the healthcare delivery and payment reform team.    

Dr. McKethan's career has spanned the private sector, government, and academia. Most recently, he was co-founder and executive vice president of a health care predictive analytics company that was acquired in 2013. Previously, he was Director of the Beacon Communities program at the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. He served as Research Director in health policy at Engelberg Center for Health Care Reform at the Brookings Institution, where he led projects focused on payment reform, health care quality, and state health policy. Prior to Brookings, he was a management consultant at the Lewin Group.   

Dr. McKethan also serves as Assistant Adjunct Professor of Health Policy and Management at the University of North Carolina’s Gillings School of Global Public Health. His work on health care delivery innovation and payment reform has appeared in such publications as the  Journal of the American Medical Association, the  New England Journal of Medicine, and  Health Affairs.  He earned his BA in political science and PhD in Public Policy Analysis at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  He also serves on the Board of Trustees for the North Carolina State Employees’ and Retirees’ Health Plan.

Strategies for Assessing Delivery System Innovations

Bradi Granger, RN, PhD, has been awarded a Winston Salem State University-Duke University School of Nursing collaborative grant, in partnership with Kristina Roberson, RN, DNP of Winston Salem State School of Nursing, and Howard Eisenson, MD, of Durham’s Lincoln Community Health Center. The program is designed to evaluate a blood pressure reduction program at Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHC’s) in both Durham and Guilford Counties. Read More

News

Members of Bass Connections Team on NC Medicaid Reform Receive Grant

Four undergraduate members of the Bass Connections NC Medicaid Reform Advisory Team will take their work further through a project called Reforming North Carolina Medicaid. This year their team studied the challenges facing the state’s current Medicaid program and provided recommendations for state-level policy action. Aakash Jain ’18 is a Biology and Economics major; Kushal Kadakia ’19 and Shivani Shah ’18 are Biology and Public Policy majors; Jackie Lin ’18 is a Biology major. Their mentors are Barak Richman and Allison Rice.  Read more
Commonwealth Fund Grant to Support Work on Bundled Delivery and Policy Innovations to Transform Care for High-Need, High-Cost Populations in the US

The grant supports work to identify globally proven solutions that can be integrated with emerging payment reforms to improve the delivery of health services for people with complex needs in the US. The goal is to provide resources from experiences outside the US that help US organizations and policymakers identify ways to improve care  under alternative payment models, thereby both accelerating care reform and advancing the adoption of payment models that improve outcomes and avoid unnecessary costs for complex and vulnerable patients.  The project is under the direction of Mark McClellan, MD, PhD, and Krishna Udayakumar, MD, MBA, and will be led by Research Fellow Zeena Johar, PhD.

Vital Directions Releases FInal Paper


The National Academy of Medicine’s Vital Directions for Health and Health Care Initiative has called on more than 150 leading experts across the country to assemble evidence-based strategies for advancing health and health care under the new presidential administration. On March 21, 2017, the NAM released the conclusive final paper in the Vital Directions series, authored by the initiative’s steering committee, which outlines key priorities for action and essential infrastructure needs. Please join us for an interactive discussion that transcends the policy debate and restores needed focus on fundamental principles for advancing health, health care, and scientific progress. Read More
Daniel Headlines DIA Podcast on 21st Century Cures
The 21st Century Cures Act provides significant funding for scientific and medical research to promote innovation that speeds development of treatments for cancer and similar devastating diseases. Many such innovations, like using real-world evidence and patient-centered drug development, themselves require innovation in how data is collected and analyzed as scientific and regulatory evidence.

In this podcast, Deputy Director for the Duke Margolis Center for Health Policy Dr. Gregory Daniel shares his expert perspective on the role that statisticians will play in advancing these initiatives. A Senior Advisor to the Reagan-Udall Foundation for the FDA, Dr. Daniel will also be a featured speaker at DIA’s Annual Statistics Forum. “What FDA really needs is to engage with statisticians within FDA but also outside of FDA, to better understand these statistical techniques, establish best practices for them, and how to ensure that their results are valid and reliable,” he explains. Listen to the Podcast

Experts
Deputy Director Gregory Daniel, along with center members Robert Califf and Adrian Hernandez moderated and presented at a plenary session at the American Heart Association’s Quality of Care and Outcomes Research Conference, held April 2-3 in Washington, DC.  The session, “Real World Evidence Generation in the 21st Century” focused on the scientific and policy requirements for the generation and use of real world evidence in the future.

Andrea Thoumi, MPP, MSc made a keynote presentation at Duke University’s “Strategies to Strengthen Health Systems Globally: A Duke Showcase” on April 4. She presented on “Aligning Policy, Payment and Practice”, focusing on the accountable care framework and best practices derived from global applications of accountable care. The event was organized by Bass Connections’ Global Alliance on Disability and Healthcare Innovation (GANDHI) project, which is led by Janet Prvu Bettger, ScD, FAHA.

Events
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The Duke-Margolis Center for Health Policy's mission is to improve health and the value of health care by developing and implementing evidence-based policy solutions locally, nationally, and globally.

Our work is focused on three themes:
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This newsletter is published monthly by the Robert J. Margolis, MD, Center for Health Policy at Duke University.

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