The Fund supports networks of state health policy decision makers to help identify, inspire, and inform policy leaders.
The Milbank Memorial Fund supports two state leadership programs for legislative and executive branch state government officials committed to improving population health.
The Fund identifies and shares policy ideas and analysis to advance state health leadership, strong primary care, and sustainable health care costs.
Keep up with news and updates from the Milbank Memorial Fund. And read the latest blogs from our thought leaders, including Fund President Christopher F. Koller.
The Fund publishes The Milbank Quarterly, as well as reports, issues briefs, and case studies on topics important to health policy leaders.
The Milbank Memorial Fund is is a foundation that works to improve population health and health equity.
Quarterly Topic
Quarterly Article
August 2025 Dorothy Y. Hung, LILLIAN C. LEVY, Thomas G. Rundall, ELINA REPONEN, WILLIAM HUEN, Stephen M. Shortell,
Lean management is a sociotechnical approach to quality improvement that aims for consistency in work processes and outcomes. This can be leveraged to reduce inequities by ensuring delivery of high-quality care to meet the needs of patients with diverse backgrounds. Despite recent efforts in the field, there is limited study on how managers implement health equity and workforce diversity goals as strategies to improve patient care. Given the important role of leadership in fostering workplace culture, we examined leader activities and specifically their use of lean management practices to support equity initiatives in health care. More
August 2025 LISA V. RUBENSTEIN, SYDNE J. NEWBERRY, ISHITA GHAI, ANEESA MOTALA, IDAMAY CURTIS, PAUL G. SHEKELLE, TODD H. WAGNER, L. DIEM TRAN, STEPHEN D. FIHN, KARIN M. NELSON,
Current primary care productivity measures do not account for investment in interprofessional primary care teams in relation to primary care goals and thus are insufficient for assessing and improving primary care efficiency and productivity. We explored alternative productivity measurement methods. More
August 2025 Amanda I. Mauri, Zoe Lindenfeld, Charley Willison, THERESE L. TODD, Jonathan Purtle, DIANA SILVER,
Individuals with behavioral health disorders are more likely to experience substantial harm from a police encounter, prompting reforms to minimize encounters between police and people experiencing a behavioral health crisis. One strategy involves expanding partnerships between certified community behavioral health clinic (CCBHC) mobile crisis teams and emergency response systems, often through two models: 911 referral, wherein a CCBHC’s behavioral health practitioner–only team responds to 911 calls, and co-response, wherein a CCBHC clinician joins a police or emergency medical services (EMS) team. More
June 2025 Dennis P. Scanlon, Jillian B. Harvey, Cheryl L. Damberg, Pratiksha Mahendra Bhagat, Yunfeng Shi,
In this article, we discuss why reliance on transaction prices and market share alone is not sufficient for effective health policy development and regulatory enforcement in health care markets that are imperfectly competitive. We discuss the need to better measure the output produced by health care suppliers and to capture the costs of producing that output. More
Quarterly Opinion
December 2024 Lawrence O. Gostin, Alexandra Finch, Adi Radhakrishnan, Eric A. Friedman,
In every major global health milestone in our lifetimes, the United States has been at the forefront—from smallpox eradication in 1980 and the… More
October 2024 Hector P. Rodriguez, SARAH D. EPSTEIN, Amanda L. Brewster, TIMOTHY T. BROWN, STACY CHEN, Salma Bibi,
This article qualitatively assess physician groups’ barriers and facilitators of planning and implementing BCBSMA’s financial incentives to improve equity of ambulatory care quality by patient race and ethnicity. More
July 2024 Pierre-Henri Bréchat, Angela Fagerlin, Anthony Ariotti, Alexis Pearl Lee, Smitha Warrier, Nancy Gregovich, Pascal Briot, Rajendu Srivastava,
The Quadruple Aim includes improving the experience of care, improving the health of populations, reducing per capita costs of care, and improving the work life of the care providers. We propose expanding a recently defined Fifth Aim of health equity to include health democracy, ensuring that that the health and health care wants, needs, and responsibilities of populations are being met, and also propose adding a Sixth Aim of preserving and improving the health of the environment to create the best health possible. More
July 2023 Chanee D. Fabius, Safiyyah M. Okoye, Mingche M. J. Wu, Andrew D. Jopson, Linda C. Chyr, Julia Burgdorf, Jeromie Ballreich, Danny Scerpella, Jennifer L. Wolff,
A framework and analyses describing the variable relationships between LTSS-relevant environmental factors and person-reported care experiences. More
May 2023 Trisha Greenhalgh, Eivind Engebretsen, Roland Bal, Sofia Kjellström,
In this review paper, authors explore the crucial contribution of human values to complex interaction and change. In the form of “simple rules,” we offer some preliminary recommendations for a more contemporary and values-informed approach to complexity in health care. We invite a new generation of research to extend the existing evidence base. More
September 2022 Mitchell Tang, Michael E. Chernew, Ateev Mehrotra,
For years, telehealth has been touted as a potentially transformative technology that will increase health care access and efficiency. Although the use of telehealth already was growing, the pandemic drove a dramatic expansion. More