March 2012 [.Pdf]

CMU’S NEWS SOURCE FOR FACULTY & STAFF 3/12 ISSUE 2 G AYNOR H O P ES TO S HARE D ATA F RO M 5 B I ll ION M E D ICA L C L AI M S 5 BOOK FOSTERS DESIGN METHODS 10 B IO L O G Y S TU D ENT N A M E D $1 BILLION & COUNTING C HURCHI ll S CHO L AR 11 VIP V ISITORS D ISCUSS G L O B A L A ffAIRS ON C A mp US $1.01B “Let’s See How 2/14/2012 Far We Can Go” n Piper Staff With 16 months still to go in Carnegie Mellon’s Inspire Innovation campaign, CMU has crossed the $1 billion milestone. But the campaign is not over yet. “The success of Inspire Innovation is a testament to the loyalty and generos- ity of our alumni, faculty, staff, parents, students and friends,” said University President Jared L. Cohon. “They believe in us deeply, and they’ve demonstrated it through their support of the campaign.” Cohon sent an email to the university community in mid-February to share the news. “Reaching this milestone early is impressive, especially when you consider that the public launch of the campaign in C ONTINUE D ON P AGE T H REE Presidential Search Committee Named Music School n Piper Staff Celebrates The search for a successor to President • Edward Frank (SCS ’85), vice The faculty members are: Jared L. Cohon officially began Feb. 17, president, Apple, Inc.; • Anthony Rollett, professor, De- 100 Years when CMU Chairman of the Board Ray • Larry Jennings, Jr. (MCS ’84; partment of Materials Science and Lane announced the membership of a Tepper ’87), senior managing Engineering, College of Engineering, Concerts To Be Held 17-member search committee. director, ValStone Partners; chair, Faculty Senate, chair, Faculty in NYC, Pittsburgh Chaired by Trustee James E. Rohr, • Juliet Lea Hillman Simonds; Committee; chairman and CEO of PNC Financial • Manoj Singh (Tepper ’76), global • Irene Fonseca, professor, Department n Heidi Opdyke Services Group and chair of the board’s managing partner, Operations, of Mathematics, Mellon College of About 200 student performers and Nominating and Governance Committee, Deloitte; and Science; distinguished alumni spanning six the diverse committee is comprised of • Paula Wagner (CFA), producer/own- decades will appear in concerts nine trustees and eight faculty members er, Chestnut Ridge Productions C ONTINUE D ON P AGE T W ELVE celebrating the School of Music’s representing all seven schools and colleges. 100th anniversary. The concerts, which will be played The trustee members are: March 31 at the Benedum Center in • Andress Appolon (CMU ’02), founder Pittsburgh, and April 2 at Carnegie Hall in and president, Appolon Strategies New York City, will feature Schumann’s LLC; “Konzertstück for Four Horns.” The • John Bertucci (CIT ’63; Tepper ’65), four parts will be played by the New chairman, MKS Instruments, Inc.; York Philharmonic’s Howard Wall (BFA • Howard Ellin (Dietrich College ’85), ’72), San Antonio Opera’s principal horn partner, Skadden Arps Slate Meagher Peter Rubins (BFA ’86), CMU faculty and Flom; C ONTINUE D ON P AGE FOUR O NE Health Care Cost Institute To Share Data From 5 Billion Claims n Ken Walters Martin Gaynor, the E.J. Barone Professor of Economics and Health Policy at the Heinz College, focuses his research on competition in health care markets and on the role of incentive structures within health care. Gaynor is the chairman of the governing board of the recently launched Health Care Cost Institute, an unprecedented health research initiative that will allow researchers and policymakers access to a comprehensive collection of health plan and government payer data to offer new insights into health care costs, utilization and intensity. What is the Health Care Cost into how much of cost increases are Institute? due to changes in utilization, prices and It’s a new independent, non-profit, non- intensity of service. We also can look at partisan entity, dedicated to improving specific kinds of treatments or diseases the state of knowledge about health and at different regions of the country. care costs and utilization in the United So there’s a lot of things we can do to get States. a better sense of what some of the driv- Our major data sources initially ers of health care costs are and where the come from large private insurance changes are coming from. companies. About two-thirds of all KAULEN We also want to put the data behind M Americans are privately insured, and the scorecards online in a user-friendly up to this point, there hasn’t been really interface. So anyone who is interested good complete systematic information HOTO BY TI can get a look at the slices of data that P about them. Up until now most informa- are of particular interest to them. EED N tion comes from the Medicare program, M ARTIN G AYNOR and while that is clearly very important I understand you’re working with that’s only part of the picture. more than five billion medical claims. It could be relevant to government, to the Medicare regulates the prices they Our goal is to complete that picture How do you make sense of the providers themselves, to private payers, pay to hospitals and doctors. But there and get information to the general pub- enormous amount of information? to insurance companies. have been quite a few studies establishing lic, policymakers and industry partici- It’s a very large undertaking. There are that quality of care, for Medicare benefi- pants that will allow for better decisions some challenges. One is that the datasets That brings us right to health care ciaries, is substantially lower in places and better policy to be made. are so large. But with advances in com- competition. How important is it for where there’s not a lot of market com- puting, there are methods to handle large an area to have a competitive health petition. That also is true in places like How will you accomplish this? databases. A little more forbidding is that care base? England — patients that go to hospitals We see ourselves as engaging, roughly the data are complex, and there definitely I think it’s quite important. It’s an area facing less competition are at substantially speaking, in two major activities. will be a lot we’ll have to learn. of health policy that hasn’t received higher risk for worse medical outcomes. One is what we’re calling score- Initially we want to focus on the as much attention as some other areas cards that we will publish on a biannual scorecards, which will be fairly ag- like expanding insurance coverage, or When you look at the nation’s health basis to provide summary information gregate kinds of analyses, dedicated to improving the quality of care, or mal- care system, where do you think it’s on what’s happening with health care exhibiting patterns in the data. practice. Those are all vital areas. But going? costs for the population that we have The other set of activities we will be folks in health policy haven’t paid too We are not heading in a good direction, in our data. We can break those down engaging in is making the data avail- much attention to competition. In my which folks have been saying for quite able to researchers. To start we have a view, that’s a mistake. We have a system some time. On the public side, we are on small set of projects. These projects will in which we rely on markets to produce an unsustainable path. Public spending on accomplish two goals. First, they will and deliver health care. That’s true not medical benefits over the past 20, 30 years generate new knowledge about health only in the U.S., but increasingly in oth- has grown about 2.3 times faster than na- care costs. Second, they will help us er countries, as they reform their health tional income. So we are spending money PIPER understand the data better. They will in- systems. England, the Netherlands, and on health care faster than is our ability to 3/12 Issue evitably find what does or doesn’t work, many other countries are decentral- pay for it. P UBLI S HER izing their health systems and trying to On the private side, again, the Teresa Thomas where there are things that are clear or if there are certain problems associated encourage choice and competition. concern in general is that while health E DI T OR M ANAGING E DI T OR About half of all the dollars of Bruce Gerson Heidi Opdyke with the data. Our goal is ultimately to care spending is valuable and has been have a nice, clean, uniform database that health care financing are private dollars increasing in value, it’s been increasing so W RI T ER S Jocelyn Duffy Byron Spice we make publicly available for non-com- as opposed to public. So we rely on mar- fast that some of the spending is crowding Bruce Gerson Chriss Swaney mercial, non-partisan scientific research. kets there to a great extent. And if the other priorities. We spend money on some Heidi Opdyke Teresa Thomas markets aren’t working properly, then Shilo Rea Ken Walters things that are fairly low cost and do a lot Kevin O’Connell Cora Wang What impact will this information have? we are not going to get the outcomes that of good, like aspirin for heart patients.

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