Professor Receives Grant from Robert Wood Johnson Foundation
Press Release - June 15, 2006
Dennis Scanlon, associate professor of health policy and administration in the Penn State College of Health and Human Development, has been awarded a two-year, $500,000 grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
The funding will be used to conduct an evaluation of a new foundation national initiative -- Aligning Forces for Quality: The Regional Market Project -- that aims to improve the quality of health care in local and regional communities. The Aligning Forces program will help communities advance and align three key drivers of health-care quality improvement: performance measurement and public reporting; capacity to help providers improve the quality of ambulatory chronic illness care; and consumer demand. The program will examine health-care markets throughout the United States and identify ways to engage all of the "players" in those markets -- consumers, providers, health plans and employers -- in quality improvement efforts.
Scanlon's research focuses on national efforts to reduce medical errors and improve health-care quality. He is a recipient of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Investigator in Health Policy Research Award and also has received funding from the Centers for Disease Control, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, The California HealthCare Foundation and the Integrated Benefits Institute.