State Health Policies Aimed at Promoting Excellent Systems: A Report on States’ Roles in Health Systems Performance

States shape the health system in many ways: as purchasers, regulators, and conveners. Despite these various roles, there is little systematic effort to monitor state choices, learn from the choices states make, and purposefully spread one state’s innovations to other states. Coordination between states and the federal government on approaches to improving the health care system is often lacking, limiting our nation’s ability to address critical problems. In an effort to improve health system performance and increase the spread of innovation, the National Academy for State Health Policy (NASHP), with support from the Commonwealth Fund, prepared this report on a broad array of state health policies and practices. This report describes a tremendous amount of activity at the state level and which has implications for how well the health care system performs