AHRQ: How to evaluate PCMH evidence of value

The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality and Mathematica Policy Research are pleased to announce the release of a decision maker brief and white paper on building the evidence base for the medical home. In these new resources, we discuss how to improve the quality of the PCMH evidence and evaluations to ensure that the best policy decisions are made.

The decision maker brief offers a concise description of why and how to commission effective evaluations of medical home demonstrations. It captures some of the lessons we’ve learned while reviewing the current evidence on the PCHM including thoughts on what outcomes to assess, why to include control practices, and why not accounting for clustering can doom an evaluation.

The white paper provides practical information for researchers, implementers, evaluators, and those who fund them about how to determine the effect sizes a given study can expect to detect, identifies the number of patients and practices required to detect policy-relevant, achievable effects, and demonstrates how evaluators can select the outcomes and types of patients included in analyses to improve a study’s ability to detect true effects.

You can access the brief and white paper by clicking on the following links:


Power brief (Improving Evaluations of the Medical Home)

Power paper (Building the Evidence Base for the Medical Home: What Sample and Sample Size Do Studies Need?)


To learn more about what AHRQ has been up to, please visit: pcmh.ahrq.gov.