Submission date: 28 February 2009

The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) is sponsoring a special issue of Medical Care Research and Review entitled “Translating Frontiers into Practice: Taking the Next Steps towards Improving Efficiency.”

In April 2008, AHRQ released a report entitled, “Identifying, Categorizing, and Evaluating Health Care Efficiency Measures.” This report, prepared by RAND Corporation, identified frontier techniques, including stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) and data envelopment analysis (DEA), as among the most promising approaches for measuring provider efficiency and for suggesting strategies for improving the delivery of health care services. Nevertheless, the report expressed concern that the technical nature of frontier analysis was a potential impediment to its widespread, practical use.

The aim of this special issue is to assess the state of the science of using frontier techniques to measure provider efficiency and to identify steps that can be taken to increase its accessibility to end users. Since about 60 percent of peer-reviewed, published studies focus on the hospital industry, this special issue will emphasize the application of frontier techniques to hospitals.

Medical Care Research and Review is actively soliciting conceptual papers, empirical analyses, syntheses of existing studies, and position papers on how the results can or should be used by policy makers and health care managers.

The anticipated publication date in print for the theme issue is April 2010. Other key dates are

• February 28, 2009: Initial submission of manuscripts for the special issue.
• December 2009: Notification of assignment to special issue or regular issue.
• April 2010: Print publication date of the special issue.

Questions regarding the special issue can be sent to Ryan Mutter, PhD at rmutter@ahrq.gov or Michael Rosko, PhD at mdrosko@widener.edu.

Manuscripts should be submitted by mailing one hard copy to:

Ryan Mutter, PhD
Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality
Center for Delivery, Organization and Markets
540 Gaither Road
Rockville, MD 20850, USA

and by emailing a Microsoft Word compatible electronic copy to mcrr.special.issue@hotmail.com

For manuscript guidelines please see a recent issue of the journal or visit the Manuscript Submission Guidelines online at http://mcrr.sagepub.com/.