Delivering Better Care

As states consider expanding or creating health programs that address social needs, this analysis of North Carolina’s COVID-19 Support Services offers considerations such as building the capacity of community-based human service organizations, creating feedback channels for all providers, and more.

Our third post in the Health Equity Blog series summarizes a discussion by researchers and policy administrators outlining opportunities for states to further health equity through managed care organizations. Representatives from Michigan also shared their efforts to embed health equity throughout their state’s Medicaid program.

The Evidence-Informed State Health Policy Institute (ESHPI) developed a COVID-19-related research agenda exploring how Medicaid can examine the long-term impact on beneficiaries and the program.

Previous evidence indicates that people exposed to police brutality are more likely to face mental health challenges like depression, anxiety, and posttraumatic stress disorder, that Black people and people of color are more likely to experience police brutality, and, that these same populations are more likely to have unmet needs for mental health care. This plain language summary highlights new research from Alang et al. that connects these themes and demonstrates for the first time that exposure to police brutality is itself associated with unmet mental health needs.

2020 AcademyHealth Delivery System Science Fellows reflect on the benefits of the fellowship and lessons learned while being embedded within health systems.

In this Ideas and Opinions paper, authors explore historical and current reasons for using quotation marks when documenting a clinical encounter and recommend rewording sentences to avoid quotes that do not confer obvious benefit and might be misinterpreted.

With funding from the National Institutes on Drug Abuse (NIDA), Medicaid Outcomes Distributed Research Network (MODRN) members and AcademyHealth conducted key informant interviews with nine states to describe the roles that Medicaid programs have taken to address the opioid epidemic and their policy and operational decisions.