What is the Healthcare Openness and Access Project?

The three goals of healthcare reform are to lower the costs, improve the quality, and broaden access to healthcare services. Contrary to the beliefs of many, these goals cannot be attained by fixating solely, or even primarily, on health insurance reform.

States have (and should have) substantial control over the delivery of health care—and not solely or principally in the area of insurance reform. To make maximum use of state powers in improving care, it is vital to have a basis for comparison—to see what works in other states.

The Healthcare Openness and Access Project (HOAP) is a set of tools providing state-by-state measures of the flexibility and discretion that patients and providers have in managing health and health care. In other words, how open are each state’s laws and regulations to institutional variation in the delivery of care, and how much access to varying modes of care does this confer on the state’s patients and providers?

In this video, Dr. Darcy Bryan, one of the project's authors, explains the thinking behind HOAP and how policymakers and patients can use it to their advantage.