Newswise — PHILADELPHIA (April 14, 2017) -- Matthew McHugh, PhD, JD, MPH, RN, CRNP, FAAN, the Rosemarie Greco Term Endowed Associate Professorship in Advocacy, Associate Professor of Nursing, and Associate Director of Center for Health Outcomes and Policy Research at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing (Penn Nursing) has been appointed to the Pennsylvania Health Care Cost Containment Council (PHC4) by Governor Thomas Wolf. The appointment is for four years.

PHC4 was formed to address rapidly growing health care costs. Its strategy to contain costs is to stimulate competition in the health care market by giving comparative information about the most efficient and effective health care providers to individual consumers and group purchasers of health services; and by giving information to health care providers, they can identify opportunities to contain costs and improve the quality of care they deliver.

“It is an honor to serve our state as a Penn Nurse on this important independent agency charged with ensuring high quality care is accessible to all Pennsylvanians,” said McHugh.

PHC4 collects over 4.5 million inpatient hospital discharge and ambulatory/outpatient procedure records each year from hospitals and freestanding ambulatory surgery centers in Pennsylvania. This data, which includes hospital charge and treatment information as well as other financial data, is collected on a quarterly basis and verified by agency staff. It also collects data from managed care plans on a voluntary basis.

PHC4 is funded through the Pennsylvania state budget. It receives revenue through the sale of its data to health care stakeholders around the state, the nation and the world.

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