Center for Research on Quality in Managed Care

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The UCLA/RAND Center for Research on Quality of Managed Care is a proposed Advanced Services Research Center built upon the strengths of our current Services Research Center but reformulated to match new aims. Little is known about how to improve the sustainability and dissemination of evidence-based treatments for major psychiatric disorders and service delivery interventions that support them, or how to fit such interventions to diverse local practices, community settings, and populations. Achieving substantial changes in quality of care will require interventions targeted at different stakeholders and components of the healthcare system, such as consumers, family members, providers, practices, policy, or communities. The aims of the Center are: (1) To inform practices, policymakers, and consumers about how to reduce (from a societal perspective) the burden of illness for major psychiatric disorders, through interventions at the levels of practice, policy, and consumer/community, that are designed to support sustained improvement in the quality of care for these disorders across the lifespan. We focus on four domains of quality: effectiveness, efficiency, consumer-centeredness, and community relevance. We focus on interventions targeted at community-based, organized, managed healthcare systems in the public and private sectors within their local context (Principal Research Core); (2) To develop a community-based, multi-stakeholder consortium that uses the Center to develop research on quality improvement for major mental disorders and to support the network in participating in, utilizing, and disseminating Center findings and products (Research Network Development Core); (3) To provide scientific, administrative, budgetary, and technical support to advance the Center's research, disseminate findings and approaches, and facilitate the development of new investigators (Operations Core);(4) To advance the methodological basis for conducting high-quality research consistent with the Center's aims through application and development of qualitative, quantitative, and integrated research methods, and to disseminate understanding of research methods among community-based research network partners (Research Methods Core); (5) To improve quality of care for diverse populations: across disorders (focusing initially on depression, schizophrenia, and attention deficit disorder); age groups; and ethnically diverse, low-income populations.