Reports

This brief User’s Guide is designed to accompany orientation and training sessions that will be provided to the statewide and regional Councils in Massachusetts that use the Q.A. report as a foundation for exploring how to use data as a quality tool. To use data effectively requires that users have a basic understanding of the benefits and limitations of data. That is the purpose of this guide and the training sessions that will be provided to Quality Council members.

The Massachusetts Supportive Housing Program (SHP) was developed in 1999 to strengthen coordination between housing and service agencies to support aging in place by creating an “assisted living like” environment in state funded, public elderly housing. On site service coordination and seven-day a week, 24-hour available personal care services contribute to important resident perceptions of increased safety and security.

This report assesses the experiences of personal assistance workers in the first Cash and Counseling demonstration project, Arkansas’ IndependentChoices. It describes the types and amount of care that paid workers provide, the training and supervision they receive, their working conditions, and their well-being. It also looks at how the worker-consumer relationship affects key outcomes, comparing the experiences of agency workers to those of directly hired workers.

States that are trying to streamline policies and paperwork to help people receive long term care and support in community settings are re-examining the processes they use to determine eligibility for programs. This technical assistance document focuses on one of those processes, determining “level of care”, and provides clarification about federal requirements for physician involvement.

The objective of this workshop was to create an ongoing mechanism within the state to continue communication, coordination, and improved collaboration among key public and private stakeholders involved in systems change activity.

The primary purpose of this technical assistance activity was to promote sustainability of CMS-funded infrastructure developments that demonstrate promise by explicitly linking them to the state’s strategic plan.

This technical assistance document is the first in a series of papers that examines issues pertaining to respite services as part of the Medicaid program. By reviewing the prevalent definitions of respite in the published literature and federal documents, we seek a consistent view of respite services that can be used in the development of administrative policies to support respite for Medicaid HCBS beneficiaries and their informal caregivers.

This issue brief will present several approaches that attempt to tackle the underlying challenge of reducing nursing facility utilization and expenditures. These range from modifying the nursing facility reimbursement methodology; to converting nursing facilities to assisted living centers, paying nursing facilities to take beds off-line, and using capitated managed long-term care; to approaches with theoretical promise that have yet to be adopted in any state.

These briefs have been developed to assist the CMS Real Choice grantees who are focusing on strengthening systems of care for children and adolescents with severe emotional disturbances. Five briefs are included in the set. The briefs focus on assessment of children, therapeutic foster care, wraparound services, flexible funding, and multisystemic therapy.

The survey results highlight inconsistencies and gaps in training, testing, and other pre-employment requirements for nursing assistants. The results from the nurse aide registries are presented in a series of charts. The survey notes who pays for pre-certification training in each state, whether candidates are allowed to become certified by passing the test without undergoing training, whether nurse aides pay a fee to be licensed or certified, who does criminal background checks, and more.