Joan L. Buchanan, PhD, joined the faculty of the Department of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School in 1996. Prior to that she served as the associate director of the Health Sciences Program at RAND, where she spent the first 16 years of her career.
Dr. Buchanan is the principal investigator of a project on the hospitalization of nursing home residents, funded by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. This project uses linked MDS and hospital claims data to model case mix adjusted hospitalization rates. Medical director and director of nursing surveys provide information on nursing home attitudes and policies influencing hospitalization.
Dr. Buchanan is the co-principal investigator of a project for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services that will evaluate and make final recommendations on proposed revisions to the national nursing home resident assessment instrument’s minimum dataset, the MDS 3.0. Two expert panels will be used to evaluate the validity of proposed items and refine and prioritize items for retention in the instrument. A national field trial will collect MDS 2.0 and 3.0 data from 2,000 residents in 50 nursing homes across the country.
As part of a Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (CAHPS) project, she is looking into the feasibility of developing a consumer satisfaction instrument for nursing home residents. This project is a joint effort with Research Triangle Institute, Westat, and RAND. She is also a consultant to the skilled nursing facility payment refinement project.
Formerly, she was the principal investigator of a project entitled Assessment Instruments for PPS, sponsored by the Health Care Financing Administration, which evaluated the use of the Minimum Data Set for Post Acute Care for use in classifying patients for payment in inpatient rehabilitation hospital settings. Study findings helped shape the final implementation of the Medicare prospective payment system for rehabilitation.
Other recent research includes projects on managed care programs for chronically ill patients in nursing homes, the appropriateness of hospitalizations in nursing facility residents, rehabilitation payment system design, and the effects of premium design on insurance plan choice and market stability.
Dr. Buchanan received her bachelor’s degree, magna cum laude, in economics and her MS and PhD in operations research from the University of California at Los Angeles. She also spent a year at the University of Lund, Sweden, studying economics.