Peterson Center on Healthcare | Impact Summary
Pathways to A brighter future
Peterson Center on Healthcare
The Peterson Center on Healthcare engages in a variety of initiatives to accelerate the adoption of innovative solutions that improve quality and lower cost on a national scale.
Pathways to
High-performance
healthcare
Transforming Healthcare to Improve Outcomes and Lower Costs
The Center collaborates with stakeholders across healthcare, including providers, payers, employers, and patient groups. Its work strengthens America’s health data infrastructure, informs and improves healthcare purchasing, and supports solutions that reduce costs and make care more affordable, efficient, and effective.
Healthcare spending currently represents about
17% of U.S. GDP
and is projected to outpace growth in the overall economy in the years ahead.
Peterson Health Technology Institute
Digital health technologies have vast potential to improve U.S. health system performance by revolutionizing delivery, advancing better outcomes, enhancing the patient experience, and promoting equity — all while lowering costs. Yet, patients, providers, payers, and investors have limited information about the efficacy and performance of the many digital health tools entering the sector. To fill this information gap with independent, publicly available evaluations, the Center launched the Peterson Health Technology Institute (PHTI) in 2023. With the aim of improving health and lowering costs, PHTI provides rigorous, evidence-based assessments of innovative digital health technologies in a range of areas.
PHTI’s evaluations are intended to accelerate adoption of high-value technologies by supporting purchasing decisions for employers, providers, and health plans seeking to understand the impact and effectiveness of new digital health solutions coming to market. Additionally, PHTI evaluations provide guidance to technology developers and investors on the evidence required to demonstrate clinical and economic benefits.
Assessments
Assessment Framework
PHTI partnered with the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review (ICER), a leader in health technology assessment, to develop a custom framework to identify the most promising digital health solutions. The ICER-PHTI Assessment Framework for Digital Health Technologies evaluates clinical benefits and economic impact, as well as their effects on health equity, privacy, and security.
Since its launch, PHTI has released three assessments — digital diabetes management solutions, virtual musculoskeletal solutions, and digital hypertension management solutions — that have been broadly circulated among payers, investors, and providers across the industry to drive evidence-based decision making.
Digital Hypertension Management Solutions
Hypertension, or high blood pressure, is one of the most common chronic conditions in the United States and affects an estimated 120 million people, or nearly half of U.S. adults, have hypertension.
PHTI’s evaluation found that digital hypertension solutions focused on medication management deliver rapid and clinically meaningful improvements in blood pressure that outperform usual care, while other digital approaches to hypertension management are less effective and do not provide clinically meaningful improvements.
Virtual Musculoskeletal (MSK) Solutions
Nearly one in three people in the United States have an MSK disorder, which are the leading causes of disability and account for nearly 10% of medical spending in the United States. These conditions impair patients’ daily lives, impact their productivity, limit their ability to work and earn a living, and contribute to mental health challenges.
PHTI found that for people with a range of musculoskeletal (MSK) conditions, many virtual solutions deliver clinically meaningful improvements in pain and function.
Digital Diabetes Management Solutions
In the United States, about one in seven adults has type 2 diabetes, which is the eighth leading cause of death. At over $400 billion of total healthcare spending annually, diabetes is the most expensive chronic condition to treat and manage. Given the critical role of patient self-management, investment in digital health tools has surged in recent years.
PHTI’s evaluation found that digital diabetes management tools do not deliver meaningful clinical benefits, and result in increased healthcare spending.
Collaboration
PHTI Summit
For its first anniversary, PHTI convened more than 100 senior healthcare executives for discussion on the future of investment, evidence generation, and adoption of digital health tools. The PHTI Summit brought together healthcare leaders from across disciplines — including clinical and payer experts, patient advocates, health economists, and investors — who spoke about the challenges and opportunities they face in advancing the adoption of high-value technologies.
Research
State of Digital Health Purchasing Survey
In 2024, PHTI released its inaugural State of Digital Health Purchasing survey. The survey captured information about purchasers’ selection process, contracting approach, and future adoption plans in the burgeoning, multibillion-dollar digital health technology industry.
Unlocking Value in Digital Health: Challenges and Opportunities to Implementing High-Value Technologies
In 2023, the Center conducted in-depth market research to understand specific challenges and drivers of digital health purchasing. This landscape analysis helped build the foundation informing PHTI’s work.
Fostering Innovative Solutions
The Peterson Center on Healthcare supports innovative research and solutions that have the potential to transform the U.S. healthcare system. Expanding the use of new health technologies that are proven to work can lead to improved outcomes, enhanced patient experience, and better access to equitable, affordable care.
Telehealth and eConsultations
Bipartisan Policy Center
The Future of Telehealth and Remote Patient Monitoring
As telehealth and remote patient monitoring usage by Medicare beneficiaries soared during the pandemic, policymakers need evidence to understand how these types of virtual care impacted the practice of medicine and costs to Medicare. The Center funded The Bipartisan Policy Center to conduct extensive research and Medicare data analysis to inform and shape telehealth and remote patient monitoring policies.
Evaluating the Effectiveness of Online Medical Consultation Platforms
eConsults Can Lower Costs and Improve Access to Specialty HealthCare
The Center collaborated with Arkansas Blue Cross Blue Shield and research firm Mathematica to evaluate the ability of eConsultations (eConsults) to expand access to and reduce the cost of specialty care. eConsults enable primary care providers to communicate electronically with specialists through a secure system to seek a specialist’s expert opinion about the appropriate diagnosis or treatment for a patient. The partnership’s findings and results add evidence that eConsults hold promise to increase access and reduce costs.
Improving Access to Affordable Medication
The Center works with partners to increase the supply of life-saving drugs, filling a market gap that can help mitigate medication shortages and maintain affordability. Center funding also supports research to better understand the commercial and regulatory forces that shape the cost of treatments and identify solutions to address unmet needs.
CivicaRx
The Center is a funder and founding partner of Civica Rx, a nonprofit pharmaceutical manufacturer working to ensure the affordability and availability of generic medications. Established by U.S. member hospitals and philanthropic organizations, Civica Rx is focused on eliminating drug shortages and bringing down prices for patients. In its first five years, Civica Rx provided over 70 million vials or syringes of almost 65 essential generic medications to hospitals, which have been used to treat more than 45 million patients. Under Civica Rx’s model, hospitals enter contracts directly with the company, avoiding intermediaries. Doctors and pharmacists at member hospitals choose the drugs that Civica Rx provides, and Civica Rx offers all members the same price for these products, regardless of hospital size.
Informing Purchasing Decisions through Increased Transparency
As healthcare costs rise, purchasers — including federal and state governments and private employers — are spending more cover care for the people they serve. With little transparency about healthcare prices, uncertainty about health needs, and limited negotiating power, it is difficult for purchasers to address high healthcare spending.
The Center works with governments and employers to develop partnerships to advance affordable, high-quality healthcare.
Peterson-Milbank Program for Sustainable Health Care Costs
Advancing State-Based Efforts for Healthcare Affordability
A growing number of states have adopted policies to set a sustainable target for healthcare cost growth and measure statewide healthcare spending. The Peterson-Milbank Program for Sustainable Health Care Costs advances these efforts by providing technical assistance, strategic communications, and analytics support to participating states, while hosting interstate learning opportunities for state partners to facilitate peer learning on how to address underlying drivers of cost growth. By examining spending patterns across all types of payers and identifying cost drivers, these states are leading the way toward ultimately making healthcare more affordable for everyone.
Engaging Policymakers
Efficient Healthcare Markets
Caroline Pearson, Executive Director of the Peterson Center on Healthcare, testified before the Senate Finance Committee at a hearing on healthcare consolidation and corporate ownership. Pearson shared research and experience on how data transparency can improve healthcare markets. She further called on policymakers to advance transparency efforts so that healthcare purchasers can engage in more effective negotiations on health benefits. Read the full testimony.
Data Access for Employers
Mairin Mancino — the Center’s Vice President for Policy — testified before Congress in the House Subcommittee on Health, Employment, Labor, and Pensions’ hearing on strengthening the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA) and employer-sponsored health benefits. In her testimony, she emphasized the importance of data access for employers to better carry out their fiduciary responsibilities, motivate employer markets, and ultimately reduce healthcare costs. Read the full testimony.
Tracking System Performance
It is impossible to improve the performance of the U.S. healthcare system if decision-makers do not understand where the challenges and opportunities exist. That is why the Center tracks and reports on the U.S. healthcare system to identify what works — and what doesn’t — to improve quality and reduce cost.
Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker
The Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker measures and provides visualizations of the performance of the U.S. healthcare system to provide clear, actionable insights into the issues and opportunities facing healthcare.