About Us

Next Wave is a health services research, management consulting, and evaluation firm. We are dedicated to helping all sectors of the healthcare industry and regulators provide access to the highest quality care within their given fiscal constraints. We help our clients balance the competing demands created by existing or proposed Federal and State budgets, patient expectations, health plan resources, and provider needs - all within the context of the rapidly-changing healthcare marketplace.

Next Wave was founded in 1984 by John D. Shaw and a team of experienced professionals with backgrounds in management and reimbursement consulting, staff training, systems engineering and clinical systems design. Our areas of primary focus include measuring:

• Patient, resident or client needs (using assessment and classification systems)
• Quality of care and quality of life (applying outcome and satisfaction measures)
• Resource consumption (developing or evaluating costing and payment systems)
   

John has been extensively involved in health care costing, reimbursement, and patient classification since 1972.  He has been directly involved in the development and implementation of National and State hospital and long term care reimbursement and quality surveillance systems in a number of states based on case mix methodologies (DRGs and RUGs).  John has also served on a variety of projects and Technical Review Panels to develop cost-based case mix indices for DRGs and RUGs over the past 40 years.

In recent years, John has focused on promoting value by integrating payment and quality measures with clinical and social determinate risk factor adjusters.  This involves balancing the healthcare delivery viewpoint (better care) with multi-sector population health (better health) in the context of cost (affordable cost) - the Triple Aims of the National Quality Strategy (NQS).  Merging multi-setting/multi-sector data allows for evidence-based priority targeting ("Hot Spotting") to facilitate rapid cycle innovation.  A small set of "measures that matter" then expedites tracking progress in the actions implemented.

In addition to providing frequent policy input to CMS and AHRQ on payment and quality measurement, he is actively involved professionally in Academy Health and the National Quality Forum.  His national, state, and local volunteer leadership included Health Schools Network, the Coalition of Healthier Schools, the DYSDOH Statewide School Environmental Health Program and the American Lung Association of NYS, and the Asthma Task Force and Asthma Coalition of the Capital Region.