Behavioral Health

The Child and Caregiver Outcomes Using Linked Data project provides technical assistance to states to develop state-specific datasets linking the Medicaid administrative claims of parents with the records of their children from the child welfare system. The data will be combined into a multi-state, de-identified data sets for secondary data analysis.

This research report examines changes in Medicare fee-for-service Part B visits and use of telehealth in 2020 during the COVID-19 public health emergency (PHE) by beneficiary characteristics, provider specialty, and location. The analysis found that Medicare in-person visits dropped while telehealth visits increased significantly at the start of the pandemic.

Participation in the social safety net varies widely across programs—from 15 percent among eligibles for subsidized child care (CCDF) to over 75 percent for Medicaid/CHIP and EITC.  Participation differs by race and ethnicity, yet patterns are not consistent. In general rates differ more across programs than between race-ethnic groups.

Network adequacy is often defined as having enough providers within a health plan network to ensure reasonable and timely access to care. At a minimum, health plans should include a sufficient number of providers who deliver mental health and substance use disorder (SUD) services (collectively referred to in this report as behavioral health services) to support access to those services.

This playbook aims to synthesize lessons learned and recommendations from existing resources, emergency management protocols, and interviews with federal program staff about responding to emergencies and disasters.

From 1999 through 2019, there were more than 840,000 drug overdose deaths in the United States. The crisis has continually evolved and escalated, including during the COVID-19 pandemic, when an estimated 93,000 persons lost their lives to drug overdose in 2020--approximately a 30% increase over the year prior.

Dual eligible beneficiaries are an important subset of the Medicare and Medicaid populations because they have a high prevalence of chronic conditions and disabilities, substantial care needs, and high health care and long-term services and supports (LTSS) utilization and costs.

This environmental scan presents a review and synthesis of approaches and strategies adopted by drug checking programs and existing evidence on their effectiveness in changing drug use attitudes, behavior, and health outcomes. It includes studies of drug checking programs across a variety of settings in the United States and internationally.

COVID-19 pandemic’s social restrictions have prompted a surge in the mental health needs of children of all ages. Nationwide 4.3 million children/adolescents have been diagnosed with COVID-19 as of August 2021, and many of them have returned to early childhood and school settings. Schools and early childhood programs have long been essential settings for delivery of mental health services.

In an effort to help build the evidence base around the social determinants of health (SDOH), the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE) engaged RAND in a project to evaluate the current evidence from programs and policies targeting SDOH and identify the SDOH research questions, data sources, and data gaps that might be used to develop an SDOH research agenda.