Community Inclusion

NJ’s charge to advance a Medicaid LTC system where there would be more options for community care, greater consumer choice and allowance for maximum flexibility between nursing homes and HCBS is “definitely showing positive trend lines” according to this report. The state’s Global Budget Projection model offers a budgetary process for tracking and projecting its LTC expenditures. Explore detailed information about the model’s methodology and findings.

States are confronting challenging budgets along with the need to implement health reform. Many are looking to improve long-term care as a way to control costs and serve seniors and people with disabilities in settings they prefer. This newsletter describes provisions in the Affordable Care Act that assist states in expanding HCBS, the growing movement to improve facility-based care, and innovative programs in three states that seek to provide consumer-directed long-term care.

MDS 3.0 has been designed to improve the reliability, accuracy and usefulness of the MDS, to include the resident in the assessment process and to use standard protocols used in other settings. This website offers a number of resources regarding this tool, including videos, fact sheets, presentations and CMS training materials.

The “Creating Aging-Friendly Communities” online conference was designed to capture knowledge being accumulated by researchers, advocacy groups, grassroots organizations, and local governments across the U.S., and make it available to others interested in learning what they could do to make their communities more aging friendly. This article describes the conference and supporting Web site.

Unemployment of individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities (ID/DD) continues to be a significant public policy concern. This report looks at statistics over a 20-year period from several national data sets that address the status of employment and economic self-sufficiency for this population, and contains an overview of national trends, an in-depth perspective on how states collect and use employment data, and an Appendix with individual state and national profiles.

States have faced considerable challenges, but by the end of 2009, MFP programs had helped approximately 5,600 people transition to community living. This report describes the program’s status through December 2009, including how states are progressing toward their goals, and provides baseline information for analyses of impacts and outcomes.

Service definitions that focus on employment outcomes are an important component in communicating expectations and building system capacity to increase opportunities for people receiving HCBS services to participate in the general workforce. This document contains the State Employment Leadership Network’s recommendations to CMS on service definitions and related issues that reflect current practice in reinforcing a strong focus on integrated employment.

Texas is using its MFP Demonstration to address some of the obstacles to relocation and successful access to community living through interagency collaboration, development of the necessary infrastructure to support relocation, and utilization of evidence-based practices. Attached find two presentations delivered at the 2010 HCBS conference, as well as links to the program’s on-line proposal and operational protocol.

Effective return-to-work approaches can help employees work while still recuperating, protecting their earning power and boosting an organization's output. In many instances, work itself plays an important role in the recovery process. The Office of Disability Employment Policy has developed an online toolkit to help both employers and employees understand the return-to-work process and provide resources to assist in getting employees back on the job quickly and smoothly.

Market approaches must become flexible with broader access to alternate providers and services such as HCBS. In the past, HCBS networks have been expensive to build and at times unwieldy to manage without sufficient dedicated resources. This presentation, which was delivered as the keynote for the September 2010 Medicaid Management Care Congress in Washington, DC., reviews the critical challenges to overcome for success in using HCBS as a strategy to extend care access.