Project Examples

Examples of community-based health care evaluation and research projects done by the Center for HOPES: 

• Feasibility Study for Establishing a Coordinated Medical Home Network in Franklin County.  The Center for HOPES recently performed an economic study estimating the costs that would be involved in expanding medical care capacity through three models of a “medical home” concept. 
  
  
• Health Care in Columbus.   The study summarized the current state of health care in the Columbus area, and identified strategies that could be undertaken by the business community for improving health care delivery. 
  
  
• Evaluation of the Employed Immigrant Health Initiative.  The Center for HOPES was selected to perform an evaluation of the Employed Latino Health Initiative, a project being undertaken by Health Management Associates and Access HealthColumbus, through funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.  The Center for HOPES’ role is to provide evaluation of each model developed for improving Latino health, assess the potential for each model to be feasibly replicated, and offer occasional technical advice on the model development.  
  
  
• Evaluating the Impact of Proposals for Expanding Health Coverage in Ohio.  The Center for HOPES is working collaboratively with the Ohio Department of Insurance, the Health Policy Institute of Ohio, and the State Coverage Initiative team (SCI) to provide an estimation of the effects of the state health care reform proposals developed by the Ohio Healthcare Coverage Initiative Advisory Committee.  Analyses will be made of the effects of the proposals on worker productivity, wages, employment and labor market factors, job growth, health care cost stability, small businesses, disparities, wellness and prevention, disease and chronic care management, and general economic impacts.
  
  
• Estimating the Community Benefits Related to the Provision of Charitable Care.  The Center for HOPES was recently approached by a consortium of Ohio health care systems to help them estimate the spillover economic and social benefits that are experienced by a community as the result of the system’s provision of charitable care.
• Evaluating a program to screen for sexually transmitted diseases and assess behavioral risk factors in a prison population. 

• Developing new standards for cultural competency at Ohio health care facilities and measuring the benefits association with those programs.
• Developing a set of performance standards to assess costs, quality of care and utilization of services for a large managed health care plan.
• Developing an intake form for a large insurance plan that can be used to predict high cost cases and opportunities for enhanced case management.
• Analyzing the coorespondence between staff event repoting and patient complaints in a large clinical system.
• Developing and testing new comprehensive models of cultural competency testing for delivery of services to patients of diverse languages and ethnic backgrounds.