All Articles

• Obesity research: Creating healthier families and neighborhoods

  Obesity-related illnesses cost more than $190 billion annually. Interventions that introduce healthy behaviors in one family might have a ripple effect, spreading through networks and possibly reducing health care costs.
• Patient-centered care: Would you know it if you saw it?

  The Summer 2012 issue of The Permanente Journal provides a general framework for patient-centered care, describing how and why it happens at Group Health. It states that patient-centeredness is a “systems property” here
• A ‘learning health system’ moves from idea to action

  In the United States, clinicians are struggling to provide better and more affordable health care to more people—while keeping up with new scientific developments. The idea of a “learning health system” is one proposed solution for rapidly applying the best available scientific evidence in real-time clinical practice. In the August 7 Annals of Internal Medicine, a Group Health Cooperative team describes the experience of turning this intriguing concept into action.
• Good, affordable health care for all: How long will it take?

  The decision to uphold most of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) should put our country on a straighter path toward improving access, affordability, and quality for all—imperatives in our Institute’s mission.
• What do patients really want? PCORI-funded research raises the bar

  Here at GHRI—and other similar research organizations across the U.S.—scientists are busy preparing proposals for PCORI, a federally funded nonprofit organization that the Affordable Care Act established to focus on comparative effectiveness research.
• Integrated health systems form largest U.S. private-sector diabetes registry

  Group Health and 10 other integrated health systems, with more than 16 million members, have combined de-identified data from their electronic health records to form one of the largest, most comprehensive, and most geographically diverse diabetes registries in the nation. According to a new study published today in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Preventing Chronic Disease, the SUPREME-DM DataLink provides a unique and powerful resource to conduct population-based diabetes research and clinical trials.
• Genetic testing may not trigger more use of health services

  People have more and more chances to participate in genetic testing that can indicate their range of risk for developing a disease. Receiving these results does not appreciably drive up—or diminish—test recipients’ demand for potentially costly follow-up health services, according to a new study in the May 17, 2012 early online issue of Genetics in Medicine.