October 10, 2009

Aiming Higher: Results from a State Scorecard on Health System Performance, 2009

This report by Douglas McCarthy, M.B.A.; Sabrina K. H. How, M.P.A.; and Cathy Schoen, M.S., of The Commonwealth Fund and by Joel C. Cantor, Sc.D., and Dina Belloff, M.A., of the Rutgers University Center for State Health Policy was written on behalf of the Commonwealth Fund Commission on a High Performance Health System. The researchers sought to assess state performance on health care relative to benchmarks for 38 indicators of access, quality, costs, and health outcomes. The assessment was compared to a similar report released in 2007. To develop the scores, the researchers reviewed federal data sources and the Dartmouth Atlas Project.