Developmental/Intellectual Disabilities

The ACL website brings together three agencies within the Department of Health and Human Services: Administration on Aging, Administration on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities, and Office on Disability. The new website offers resources about programs, services and issues facing persons with disabilities, older adults, and family caregivers. Site features include current issues, assessable icons to learn about ACL programs and information spread to the disability and aging communities.

Review this one-stop resource created by a team of agencies to help providers better understand, develop, and sustain participant-directed programs. The information is applicable whether funded by the Older Americans Act, Veterans Health Administration, State funds or other. The toolkit has two parts: one devoted to designing, managing and evaluating programs; the second on Financial Management Services (FMS). Resources include articles, forms, webinar recordings, state examples and charts.

This brief provides a short summary of Medicaid eligibility and benefits for people with disabilities today and explains how they will be affected by the ACA in light of CMS's new regulations. Provisions of the new Exchange regulations are discussed briefly to the extent that they related to Medicaid eligibility determinations for people with disabilities.

This issue brief revisits the use of SSA work supports among the nearly three-quarters of Buy-In Participants who also receive Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI). To better understand who might benefit most from program outreach, this report explores variation in use rates by age, education, and disabling health condition. It also examines the relationship between work-support use, employment, and earnings.

The Workforce Recruitment Program (WRP) is a recruitment and referral program for students and recent graduates with disabilities, including veterans. The program uses a database to connect federal and private sector employers nationwide with college students and recent graduates with disabilities who are seeking summer or permanent jobs. Private sector employers can also access the WRP through ODEP's national Employer Assistance and Resource Network (EARN).

This review is part of a new series of reports, “Closing the Quality Gap: Revisiting the State of the Science.” The series provides a critical analysis of existing literature on quality improvement strategies and issues for topics identified by the 2003 Institute of Medicine report, “Priority Areas for National Action: Transforming Health Care Quality.” To continuously assess progress toward quality, AHRQ identified people with disabilities as a priority population in this report.

This report examines how health care outcomes for general medical care have been assessed for people with disabilities within the rubrics of care coordination and quality improvement. A total of 15,513 articles were screened; very few were direct examples of work conducted from the perspective of disability as a complicating condition. Capturing the disability perspective will require collaboration of measurement efforts across medical interventions, rehabilitation, and social support provision.

The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) was assigned to develop outcome indicators to assess the "health and welfare" of recipients of Medicaid HCBS. AHRQ also was required to use the outcome indicators to describe the health and welfare of this population. The outcome indicators are presented by individual attributes and area characteristics. The health of the HCBS population is also described within the context of State policies and service availability.

Using the International Classification of Functioning, Disability, and Health as a framework, this paper identifies definitions of disability for transition-age youth that can be used to compare and contrast statistics on the characteristics and outcomes of this population across different surveys.

This report presents a condensed summary of a research study designed to more clearly define post-school employment outcomes, document the post-school outcomes for youth with developmental disabilities, and examine the predictors of successful integrated employment for youth with developmental disabilities, as defined by eligibility for long term funding support from state developmental disabilities agencies.