Promising practices

This document describes Community Choice, New Jersey’s permanent, state-operated nursing facility transition program. The program provides information about nursing home alternatives and assistance moving from nursing facilities. This program’s implementation and impact are illustrated in this document.

This document describes Colorado’s Fast Track program, which aims to improve access to home and community-based services after a hospital discharge. In this program, staff work to facilitate quick eligibility determination for hospital patients who need long-term care after discharge. The program seeks to decrease unnecessary nursing home admittance. The implementation and impact of this program are described in the document.

This report describes the State of Washington’s program to increase the support of family caregivers for people with Alzheimer’s disease in ethnically diverse communities. The program includes outreach, education, and culturally sensitive assessment. The implementation and impact are described in this report.

This report describes the State of Washington’s plan to allow families to create a trust fund for people with disabilities without effecting eligibility. This program matches 25% of private contributions and eliminates fees to encourage participation. This document describes the program implementation.

The Utah Family Council is a non-profit organization that provides support to all families of people with disabilities, regardless of whether they receive public funding. This document describes this program, which uses funding from the Self-Determination Grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to increase availability. The report describes the program and its implementation.

This report briefly describes the New Jersey Statewide Respite Care Program. The New Jersey Department of Health and Senior Services (DHSS) administers a state-funded, Statewide Respite Care Program providing a wide variety of services to relieve unpaid, informal caregivers from the stress of caring for older people and/or people with disabilities. The respite program customizes services to the person and the caregiver, with a focus on alleviating caregiver stress.

This report documents the State of Massachusetts’ community governing boards. These boards were established to manage service delivery as a part of a self-determination initiative for people with developmental disabilities. The governing boards – elected by people with disabilities and their families – reflect Boston’s ethnic neighborhoods and serve people with similar ethnic and cultural backgrounds.

This document looks at Colorado's home and community based services. Specifically, the report focuses on single point of entry and single access points.

The State of Colorado plans to initiate a five-year research and demonstration program in 2002. Participants will be able to use money that otherwise would be spent on Medicaid home health agency and personal care services to purchase in-home services from attendants they personally select, hire, and train. The model is expected to improve the quality of attendant support and decrease the state's costs of providing care.

This link to the National Academy for State Health Policy (NASHP)website contains the presentations from the 2004 CMS Conference held March 2-3, 2004.