AcademyHealth Honors Johns Hopkins ACG Case-Mix System with 2015 Health Services Research Impact Award
Tool Assesses Health Outcomes for Tens of Millions Worldwide
A team at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health that developed one of the world’s most widely used healthcare analytical tools has been awarded AcademyHealth’s 2015 Health Services Research Impact Award. The Johns Hopkins ACG Case-Mix System is a comprehensive software-based tool that evaluates the types of medical conditions a person has and is used to assess everything from which patients are most at risk of being readmitted to a hospital to morbidity trends in populations.
AcademyHealth, a leading health-services, policy-research association, gives the award each year in recognition of research that has been applied to health policy, management or practice. Bloomberg School Professor, Jonathan Weiner, DrPH, who is ACG’s Co-Developer and R&D Director, accepted the award on behalf of the ACG team at the National Health Policy Conference in Washington, D.C. on Feb. 9.
The ACG has a long history at the Bloomberg School. Over 30 years ago, Bloomberg faculty were among the first to use computerized outpatient, diagnostic data to study the relationship between patterns of morbidity and health care use, cost and outcomes. The late Barbara Starfield, MD, MPH Weiner, Donald Steinwachs, PhD, Christopher Forrest, MD, PhD, and other colleagues conducted research that led to the development of what are known as Adjusted Clinical Groups©.
ACGs quickly gained international acceptance as a standard measurement tool in outpatient and population-based settings for health status assessment and risk adjustment based on information gleaned from health insurance claims or electronic health records. In addition to being used by researchers – there are over 700 peer-reviewed articles incorporating ACGs – the method is applied operationally by private and public health care systems to help manage and improve the care of over 100 million patients in the U.S. and in 15 other nations.
The Johns Hopkins ACG System© is used in hundreds of diverse settings around the globe for population needs assessment, capitation adjustment, chronic care management, predictive modeling and provider performance profiling. ACGs are the largest technology transfer success at Johns Hopkins and one of the largest health services research dissemination achievements in the nation.
AcademyHealth’s HSR Impact Award is selected based on the quality of research; the effectiveness of research dissemination and translation approach; and the impact on health and health care. To learn more about the ACG System, visit the ACG website.
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Media contacts for the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health: Susan Murrow at 410-955-7624 or smurrow1@jhu.edu and Barbara Benham at 410-614-6029 or bbenham1@jhu.edu.