Dr. Lisa Simpson Earns Award for Health Policy Research

Thursday, December 13, 2007

Lisa Simpson, MD, MPH, director of the Child Policy Research Center at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, has been selected to receive the 2007 Ohio Health Policy Researcher of the Year award.

Dr. Simpson, a pediatrician, accepted the award from the Health Policy Institute of Ohio and presented a summary of her work on Dec. 14 at the Ohio Health Data and Information Conference in Columbus.

Dr. Simpson won the award as the lead author of a report from the Commonwealth Fund titled "Reauthorizing SCHIP: Opportunities for Promoting Effective Health Coverage and High-Quality Care for Children and Adolescents."

The report, written by a team of noted child health policy experts, presents a framework for promoting effective health coverage and achieving high quality in both the State Child Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) and Medicaid, the other major public program that covers low-income children. The strategies discussed in the report include:

• Ensuring access to care through eligibility, enrollment and retention policies
• Providing a robust benefits package
• Strengthening provider capacity
• Measuring performance, improving quality, and providing incentives for high-quality care
• Promoting the use of health information technology

"SCHIP reauthorization presents an opportunity to transform the 'good' coverage and quality of care provided by SCHIP, and by Medicaid in Ohio, into 'great' coverage and quality," said Dr. Simpson. "It represents a chance to expand both the federal government's leadership role and the resources available to support Ohio in developing high-performing, accountable public health care programs for children."

Dr. Simpson came to Cincinnati Children's earlier this year from All Children's Hospital in St. Petersburg, Florida, where she was Guild Endowed Chair in Child Health Policy and Professor of Pediatrics at the University of South Florida. She also is former deputy director at the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Cincinnati Children's, one of the top five children's hospitals in the nation according to Child magazine, is a 475-bed institution devoted to bringing the world the joy of healthier kids. Cincinnati Children's is dedicated to providing care that is timely, efficient, effective, family-centered, equitable and safe. For its efforts to transform the way health care is provided, Cincinnati Children's received the 2006 American Hospital Association-McKesson Quest for Quality Prize". Cincinnati Children's ranks second nationally among all pediatric centers in research grants from the National Institutes of Health and is a teaching affiliate of the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine. The Cincinnati Children's vision is to be the leader in improving child health.