Health Care

Brookings is committed to producing innovative policy solutions to our nation’s most difficult challenges. The country may face no more important domestic policy challenge than the much-needed reform of our health care system. Through an institution-wide effort, Brookings delivers new ideas and offers policy solutions to improve health care both at home and globally.

To help turn health care reform ideas into action, Brookings established the Engelberg Center for Health Care Reform. The Center’s mission is to be a catalyst for change by developing data-driven practical health care policy solutions that will foster high-quality innovative care that is both more affordable and more effective at actually improving patient health.

The Center will go beyond merely studying the issues and making policy recommendations. It will promote the broad-based exchange of ideas to develop consensus around practical steps, and then take it one step further by providing technical support for collaborative work among a wide range of health care stakeholders that actually implements the ideas.

The focus is on six key priority areas that are critical to the kind of reform that will improve not just the health care system, but the health of the individual patients. These areas are:

• Quality: Improving medical care by developing better ways to measure quality, cost, and value
• Financing: How to reform health care payments and benefits to promote quality and value
• Technological Advancement: Using up-to-date tools, including electronic medical records, electronic prescriptions and other technologies, to improve care more quickly and more efficiently.
• Evidence: Generating better evidence to enable providers and patients to make better health care decisions
• Access: How to expand access to affordable, quality health insurance coverage
• Innovation: Encouraging rapid and effective medical innovation that improves patient health.

Health policy concerns have also become a part of Brookings’ Metropolitan Policy Program, as states and localities become major players in delivering health care. And the Center for Social and Economic Dynamics has used dynamic modeling to predict the path of public health threats such as infectious diseases, like the Avian Flu, and chronic diseases such as obesity.

On a global scale, the Global Economy and Development program analyzes current and potential innovative health financing proposals and makes practical recommendations for moving forward to fill financing gaps using the tools of public finance, commercial finance, aid and philanthropy.