A 2021 awarded grant under the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Health Data for Action program, managed by AcademyHealth.
This project is funded under the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s research program, “Health Data for Action (HD4A),” which makes valuable data from unique data owners available to researchers to answer important research questions. The goal of the study is to provide actionable policy insights on the effects of Medicaid’s Delivery System Reform Incentive Payment Program (DSRIP) for policymakers at the state and federal level by producing causal evidence on the degree to which value-based payment (VBP) programs improve quality and utilization for Medicaid’s behavioral health population. Using data from the CMS Transformed Medicaid Statistical Information System (T-MSIS), facilitated by CareJourney, the study seeks to examine how DSRIP VBP reforms impacted outpatient utilization and quality of care for beneficiaries with unipolar depression, bipolar depression, and schizophrenia. The researchers will use a difference-in-difference study design to compare patients who are exposed to VBP through DSRIP reforms (in Arizona, New York, New Hampshire, and Washington) to similar patients in states without DSRIP reforms. The primary outcomes will be primary care and behavioral health specialist visits, and secondary outcomes will be emergency department visits and inpatient hospitalizations. The researchers will estimate overall effects nationally, as well as effects by state. The latter analysis will allow the researchers to generate insights into the impacts of different DSRIP characteristics, including reliance on managed care organizations versus provider-led delivery projects, the expansiveness of the DSRIP program, and the types and number of providers participating in DSRIP. Deliverables will include a project work plan and final narrative report. The researchers will also produce paper(s) suitable for publication and present findings at national research meetings and to other stakeholder audiences as appropriate, including policymakers at the federal, state, and local levels and other key stakeholders, as part of the deliverables for this grant.
Grant #78965
Grantee Organization: NYU Grossman School of Medicine
Grantee period: 12/1/2021– 2/29/2024
Ashley Lewis is an M.D.-Ph.D. candidate in Epidemiology at NYU Grossman School of Medicine. Read Bio
Sunita Desai is a health economist whose research investigates how policies and incentives shape healthcare pr... Read Bio