Our Mission
The mission of the Center for Health Services Research and Policy (CHRP) is to create and sustain an infrastructure that brings together expert researchers, care providers, policymakers, new investigators, and students to collaboratively improve the safety and quality of health care.
Our Goals
- Advance the science of health care quality and safety through a center that provides an infrastructure to link timely research questions, resources, investigator expertise (novice to expert), and information technologies.
- Conduct outcomes, intervention, and translational research that creates an evidence base in the priority areas of:
- Health system factors that enhance quality outcomes across health care settings, populations, and communities.
- Interdisciplinary practices and models of care that maximize safety and care quality across health care settings, populations, and communities.
- Interventions that reduce discrete harm and improve safety and care quality across health care settings, populations, and communities.
- Community-level, cross-sectoral planning, implementation, and evaluation initiatives aimed at addressing social determinants of health and reducing the health equity gap.
- New safety process and outcome metrics, technologies, and tools that support research focused on care quality and safety.
- Employ principles of translation science to disseminate and transform evidence-based safety strategies into practice and policy.
- Engage the members of the Center and other faculty to educate nurses, nurse scientists, scientists from other disciplines, international visiting scholars, and train undergraduate, graduate, and post-graduate students in theories, methods, knowledge generation, and translation of evidence related to health care quality and safety.
Our Guiding Framework
The HEALTHcare Quality Model, the guiding framework of the Center, was developed by faculty members of CHRP. Based on Donabedian’s classic quality assessment framework, it postulates a three-component approach — structure, process, and outcomes — to health care quality:
- Structure components, or contextual factors, in the model include diverse health care settings, populations, communities, social determinants of health, and current health sector and non-health sector policies.
- Process indicators in the model reflect care delivery practices, processes, and services across settings.
- Outcome indicators focus on individual, population, and community, cost, and policy impacts.
A key proposition of the model that guides the work of the Center is that structure or contextual factors influence health care delivery processes and practices, which, in turn, influence individual, population, and community, cost, and policy outcomes.