All States/Territories

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.

The Office of Inspector General’s (OIG) body of work examining Medicaid personal care services (PCS) has found significant and persistent compliance, payment, and fraud vulnerabilities that demonstrate the need for Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) to take a more active role with States to combat the issues. This document summarizes OIG’s PCS work and, on the basis of the analysis of this work in the aggregate, offers recommendations to improve the integrity of Medicaid PCS.

This report aims at comparing long-term care for older adults delivered through Home and Community-Based Services (HCBS) with care provided in nursing homes (NHs) by evaluating 1) the characteristics of older adults served through HCBS and in NHs; 2) the impact of HCBS and NH care on outcome trajectories of older adults; and 3) the per person costs of HCBS and NH care, costs for other services such as acute care, and family burden.

Review recordings and handout materials from the National Association of Medicaid Directors Fall 2012 conference. Topics include Medicaid innovations, community integration, access to care, Medicaid long term services and supports, and dual eligible integration, and much more.

This brief provides recommendations for conducting high quality systematic reviews. Systematic reviews can be useful for policy decision makers to draw accurate lessons from a large assortment of relevant studies because they identify, assess, and synthesize key pieces of evidence on policy or program effectiveness. Increasing high quality systematic reviews will provide decision makers with a greater number of useful evidence summaries that can inform decision making.

This Toolkit is designed to give state and local coalitions the strategies, tools, and resources to make a real impact on falls and fall-related injuries and deaths. It offers a rich compendium of suggested policy changes to advance falls prevention, categorized under eight major goals. It outlines the opportunities, strategies, and examples of what is possible through education and engagement of key stakeholders.

This survey provides national, statewide, and area specific, within certain states (based on population), average daily rates for private and semi-private rooms in a nursing home, monthly base rates in assisted living communities, hourly rates for home health aide and homemaker services, and daily rates for adult day services as well as the range of rates in each area surveyed. Download the survey and key findings.

The November 2012 issue of Health Affairs contains nine articles offering early insights on ACO and patient-centered medical home care delivery models. Both of these models have significantly developed in a relatively short period of time. Their goal is to further coordinate care and improve the health of patients. The nine articles examine whether either model will deliver major cost savings, especially in the short term.

Elder financial exploitation is the illegal or improper use of an older adult’s funds or property. It has been described as an epidemic with society-wide repercussions. This report describes the challenges states face in preventing and responding to elder financial exploitation, as well as the actions some federal agencies have taken to help states address these challenges.

This report profiles enrollment statistics on Medicaid managed care programs on a plan-specific level. It provides national-level summary tables relating to trends, breakout of managed care entities, managed care enrollment by state, regional breakout and states with comprehensive health care reform demonstrations. The information was collected from State Medicaid agencies and CMS Regional Offices.