The AcademyHealth Board of Directors created the HSR Impact Award to recognize research that has had a significant impact on health and health care. The award, which is supported by AcademyHealth, is intended to identify and promote examples of outstanding research that have been successfully translated into health policy, management, or clinical practice. AcademyHealth is pleased to announce the winners of the 2007 HSR Impact Award:

John Holahan, director of the Health Policy Center at the Urban Institute, received the award for work he led—along with co-Principal Investigator Alan Weil from the National Academy for State Health Policy, and a team of Urban Institute researchers including Linda Blumberg, Randall Bovbjerg, Jack Hadley, and Lisa Clemans-Cope—that offered a roadmap for designing landmark health care reform legislation in Massachusetts. The researchers authored a series of papers that made critical contributions to the underlying policy of the Massachusetts Health Care Reform Plan, which passed in April 2006 and ensures nearly universal health care coverage to Commonwealth residents.

Among the team's critical contributions was demonstrating that the health and economic benefits of expanding coverage far outweighed the additional spending needed to make it a reality. Key findings of the research team also included an accurate count of uninsured in Massachusetts, an estimate of total health care spending in the state devoted to care for the uninsured, and analysis of the resources necessary to finance coverage for the uninsured, including the need for additional spending beyond that already used to provide care to the uninsured.

• HSR Impact: Roadmap to Coverage in Massachusetts

Flaura Koplin Winston, principal investigator for Partners for Child Passenger Safety (PCPS), the largest child-specific vehicular crash surveillance system in the world, was recognized for research that has lead to improved design and regulation of Vehicular Child Restraints and Air Bags. Dr. Winston was one of the first child safety experts to raise the alarm about the dangers of front passenger air bags to children. In fact, a child's risk of injury is reduced by one-third when moved from the front to rear seat. The work of Dr. Winston and PCPS has contributed to a decline in the proportion of 4 to 8 year olds riding in the front passenger seat from 18 percent in 1999 to 6 percent in 2005. A leader in the field of child occupant protection, Dr. Winston is a physician scientist with the Center for Injury Research and Prevention at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania, School of Medicine .

PCPS, a partnership between The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, the University of Pennsylvania, and State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Company, innovatively links a multi-disciplinary team of health services researchers with the automobile insurance industry. PCPS exemplifies the power of health services research to improve health and safety for our most vulnerable populations, in this case children. The work of this innovative partnership also demonstrates that health services research can have a significant impact outside of the medical setting.

• HSR Impact: Child Passenger Safety

There are just two examples among many of the effective translation of research into health policy and practice. We encourage you to learn about previous winners and nominate insightful, impact generating work for next year's award.

HSR Impact: Specialty Hospitals
March 2006

HSR Impact: The Business Case for Nurse Staffing
March 2006

The Call for Nominations for the 2008 Award opens at the National Health Policy Conference, February 12, 2007, where Drs. Holahan and Winston will be presented with their Awards.

Selection Committee