Navigating the Evolving Landscape of COVID-19: Strategies to Increase Vaccine Confidence and Improve Vaccination Rates in the United States.

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on every individual in the United States. The launch of the COVID-19 vaccines is estimated to have averted millions of deaths and reduced over 18 million COVID-19-related hospitalizations. In September 2023, the updated 2023-2024 COVID-19 vaccine, which includes a monovalent component that corresponds to the omicron variant XBB.

An Emergent Research and Policy Framework for Telehealth.

Context: Telehealth is a fast-growing sector in health care, using a variety of technologies to exchange information across locations and to improve access, quality, and outcomes across the continuum of care. Thousands of studies and hundreds of systematic reviews have been done, but their variability leaves many questions about telehealth's effectiveness, implementation priorities, and return on investment.

Objectives: There is an urgent need for a systematic, policy-relevant framework to integrate regulatory, operational, and clinical factors and to guide future investments in telehealth research and practice.

THE FUTURIST The long-term prognosis for payment policy in an era of demand for value.

The task of forecasting the direction of healthcare finance and payment is difficult enough in just the short term, given the pace and scope of change that characterizes today's strategic environment.

UnitedHealthcare experience illustrates how payers can enable patient engagement.

Patient engagement is crucial to better outcomes and a high-performing health system, but efforts to support it often focus narrowly on the role of physicians and other care providers. Such efforts miss payers' unique capabilities to help patients achieve better health. Using the experience of UnitedHealthcare, a large national payer, this article demonstrates how health plans can analyze and present information to both patients and providers to help close gaps in care; share detailed quality and cost information to inform patients' choice of providers; and offer treatment decision support and value-based benefit designs to help guide choices of diagnostic tests and therapies.

Health information technology and health system redesign--the Quality Chasm revisited.

UnitedHealth Group constructed the Diabetes Prevention and Control Alliance (DPCA) in a manner consistent with the recommendations for health system redesign outlined in the Institute of Medicine's Crossing the Quality Chasm. This evidence-based, multidisciplinary education and intervention program is enabled by a state-of-the-art health information technology (HIT) infrastructure. DPCA coordinates and connects a variety of interventions through HIT, including community-based services offered by YMCAs and local pharmacists.

Building a national data repository to measure and improve health center quality.

Community health centers provide access to high-quality care for underserved populations and have a history of success with quality improvement initiatives, due to their mission and data reporting requirements. Investments in the health center infrastructure can bolster efforts to create a Nationwide Health Information Network to better utilize the available data. Aggregation, stratification by health center type, and use of patient-level quality data enable the development of quality measures that can be used to target health center resources and further improve quality.