Bio: Peter McNair, M.P.H., a 2007-08 Commonwealth Fund Harkness Fellow in Health Care Policy and Practice, is senior policy analyst in the Funding Policy Unit in the Australian Department of Human Services, having previously worked in the Metropolitan Health Service Performance Management and Clinical Information Units. His work focuses on the development of funding and service planning policy and the implementation of innovative policy solutions to improve health care quality. In addition to reports published for the Victorian Department of Human Services, McNair has published in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Medicine and Australian Health Review. McNair earned a master's of health science from Latrobe University, a master's of public health in clinical epidemiology from Monash University, and a bachelor's of nursing from Phillip Institute of Technology.
Placement: University of California
Mentors: Harold Luft, Ph.D.; Andrew Bindman, M.D.
Project: Inpatient Prospective Payment Systems to Improve Patient Safety
Description: Peter McNair sought to quantify the impact of Medicare's new policy not to pay hospitals for eight avoidable complications. To do so, he used hospital inpatient data from the California Office of State Health Planning and Development. In addition to calculating the financial impact of the current policy, he described alternative funding strategies to improve efficiency and reduce complications of hospital care.