Faculty

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David F. Hittle, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Health Care Policy and Research and an Assistant Director of the Center for Health Services Research (CHSR), where he has been engaged in health care research related to a variety of care settings since 1984.

Dr. Hittle currently serves as Co-Principal Investigator for the CMS-funded Nursing Home Value Based Purchasing Demonstration project, and Principal Investigator for the CMS-funded Home Health Quality Measures and Analysis project. He is responsible for overall management of project operations, including data acquisition, planning complex analyses of multiple data sets, including Medicare claims, MDS and OASIS assessment data, survey and certification data, and nursing home staffing data. Through previous research and demonstration projects he contributed to the development of the Outcome and Assessment Information Set (OASIS) and patient outcome measures for home health care, and he played a key role in the design and implementation of the statistical analyses underlying home health agency outcome and case mix reports used for outcome-based quality improvement (OBQI) including risk adjustment of patient outcomes.

His responsibilities on these projects include developing specifications for OBQI reports using OASIS national repository data and providing consultation to CMS and other contractors in the development of a system for producing these reports, as well as designing the data analysis system implemented by CMS for public reporting of home health agency patient outcomes under the Home Health Quality Initiative.

He has prepared and presented training programs on OASIS data collection, the use of OBQI outcome reports, and interpretation of outcome measures for public quality reporting, as well as technical presentations related to the methodology underlying home health outcome reporting. He has been a contributing author to a number of peer-reviewed publications in the field of health services research.

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