Lessons from HCFO Program Featured in Health Affairs Blog

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For nearly thirty years, staff at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Changes in Health Care Financing and Organization (HCFO) initiative worked to provide public and private decision makers with usable and timely information on health care policy, financing, and market developments. As the program prepares to sunset at the close of 2016, staff members from the program’s national office at AcademyHealth, Megan Collado, M.P.H., and Lauren Gerlach, M.P.P., reflect on the lessons learned in making research more useful and used in a piece for the Health Affairs blog. Some of the lessons learned include that foundations have an important role to play as knowledge brokers between the research and policy communities, particularly in the production of research, in the dissemination of study findings, and in the development of human capital—or future knowledge brokers. Collado and Gerlach also discuss some of the challenges that the program faced, including identifying effective methods to document the program’s impact.