Section 1115 Medicaid demonstration waivers provide an important mechanism for states to test new approaches to serving their Medicaid populations. While monitoring and evaluation are required components of these Medicaid experiments, they have sometimes received less attention than they should, prompting some to raise concerns about the quality, timeliness, and usefulness of evaluation results.
In a recent blog post for Health Affairs, Lauren Gerlach, director at AcademyHealth, and Mona Shah, senior program officer at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, highlight the importance of continued research and evaluation to understand the effects of policies implemented under Section 1115 waivers. The post summarizes findings from related research supported by the Foundation’s Research in Transforming Health and Health Care Systems (RTHS) program, managed by AcademyHealth, and identifies learnings that can help inform future evaluation efforts by states, their researcher partners, and the federal government. Read the full post here.
Additional RTHS research on the implementation and impact of Section 1115 waiver policies is available here.