Evaluation of the Beacon Cooperative Agreement Program

For the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC),  NORC at the University of Chicago is designing and conducting an overarching evaluation of the Beacon Community Cooperative Agreement Program, a key program being implemented through the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH), part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA). 

The Beacon Community program has funded 17 communities with relatively high levels of health IT adoption and provides them with resources to achieve measurable gains in health care quality and efficiency. 

The evaluation has four goals: 
1) Assess the achievements of the Beacon Community program in terms of meeting its key goals of improving quality, cost/efficiency, and population health
2) Assess the impact of different types of health IT-enabled interventions on outcomes selected from the key domains of quality, health care utilization/cost, and population health
3) Identify the key factors associated with successful health IT-enabled interventions demonstrated to improve care
4) Identify the key “lessons learned” from implementing these interventions in communities.

Data sources for this evaluation will include Medicare claims, case studies, site visits, and key informant interviews.