Healthcare Delivery

This report examines how integrated care models served full-benefit dually eligible Medicare‑Medicaid beneficiaries in 2021. It compares three types of integrated plans—PACE, FIDE‑SNPs, and D‑SNPs—to standard Medicare Advantage plans, with a focus on hospitalizations, emergency department visits, nursing facility use, home‑ and community‑based services, and mortality.

Children, youth, and families have unique health needs, which set the foundation for health across the life course; chronic conditions now affect nearly one in three U.S. children, with disproportionate prevalence in those enrolled in Medicaid and CHIP.

We evaluated both the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services Innovation Center (CMS Innovation Center) models and the Medicare Shared Savings Program (MSSP) and found that they have generated gross savings for all beneficiaries in the Traditional Medicare program while demonstrating positive impacts on selected quality measures.

The U.S. behavioral health (BH) workforce faces significant shortages and distribution disparities, hindering access to quality care and worsening health outcomes. A comprehensive, centralized database of BH providers is vital for advancing patient-centered outcomes research (PCOR), comparative effectiveness research (CER), and evidence-based policymaking.

This ASPE issue brief lays out a proposed comprehensive analytic framework to fully evaluate the impact of the CMS Innovation Center’s efforts on the Medicare program and the broader health care system as a whole to test innovative payment and service delivery models that reduce program expenditures while preserving or enhancing the quality of care.

During the pandemic period, telehealth utilization increased among both urban and rural enrollees in Medicaid, with urban enrollees sustaining greater gains in telehealth utilization at the end of 2021. This Issue Brief is part of a series of ASPE Issue Briefs examining changes in Medicaid utilization of services delivered via telehealth by enrollee and provider characteristics.

This report outlines the major issues faced by the U.S. health care workforce. It addresses medical, dental and behavioral health components of the workforce as well as direct care workers. The report also describes opportunities for progress to address these issues and existing activities supported by the Department to address these issues.

Nursing homes experienced unprecedented financial challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic, raising concerns about a potential increase in nursing home closures.

This research report updates prior reports on Medicare FFS telehealth trends during the COVID-19 public health emergency with data through end of 2021, by beneficiary characteristics, visit specialty and geography including by state. Medicare telehealth flexibilities during the COVID-19 pandemic continued to encourage use of telehealth among Medicare beneficiaries in 2021.

Telehealth utilization has changed over time since the steep increase from the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. This report updates prior findings on national trends of telehealth use through an analysis using the Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey data from April 2021 through August 2022.