Faculty: 
John Cutler, Office of Personnel Management, Moderator; William Marton, Ph.D., ASPE;  Brian Burwell, Truven Health Analytics; Enid Kassner, M.S.W. AARP Scorecard

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Changes in Health Care Financing and Organization (HCFO) program is pleased to offer a webinar on best practices for obtaining and using data from the Health and Retirement Study for health services research.

This webinar provides an in-depth look at Section 4302 of the Affordable Care Act and its implications for disparities research. David Meyers of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality will point to specific language that impacts racial/ethnic data collection. Commentary will be provided by José J. Escarce, M.D., Ph.D., Professor of Medicine, University of California, Los Angeles/RAND. 

This session engages participants in a discussion about the importance of health services research in helping to optimize the rigor, relevance, and real-time nature of knowledge generation. Panelists review some of the important characteristics that have helped to shape the field of HSR thus far, and discuss the ways in which emerging data trends may lead to a substantial shift in its methods and conduct. 

As one of the primary sources of information on health services use, claims data are fundamental to health services research. This three-part webinar series on the recently developed Medicare Claims Public Use Files (PUF) provides a unique opportunity to explore an important new data resource. The series will be taught by senior managers and researchers from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid and Impaq International. Webinars will provide an overview of the files, offer analytic examples to highlight potential uses, and discuss privacy and confidentiality issues that are important to understanding the opportunities and challenges of PUFs.