Reports

Discusses options for combining Medicaid long-term care funding and expanding the scope of long-term care services. The call was organized in response to a need identified by a grantee and included states that were available and had relevant experience with the questions being raised.

Case study reports on programs in 9 states that received federal Nursing Home Transition Grants from 1998 - 2000 are now available. New reports describe programs, implementation, and lessons learned from transition programs in Arkansas, Florida, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Texas, Vermont, Michigan, Wisconsin and from a hospital to nursing home diversion program in Colorado.

Collaboration between state Medicaid and Mental Health programs has varied greatly across states and administrations. The purpose of this paper is to identify and describe the basic elements of successful collaboration through 1) a review of the literature on collaboration, and 2) a description of collaboration in two states. The state examples highlight the mechanisms through which successful collaboration occurs and describe the types of activities in which collaborating agencies engage.

Ohio has been using its Real Choice Systems Change grant to bring people together to consider options to streamline access to information about long term services. A group of county, municipal and private organizations in Ohio are working with state agencies to develop a pilot project. On December 13-14, 2004, policy experts from Rutgers Center for State Health Policy and the National Academy for State Health Policy met with stakeholders to provide information and technical assistance.

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.