Mental Health

Assisted outpatient treatment (AOT) is a civil court procedure whereby a judge orders an adult with serious mental illness (SMI) to comply with community-based treatment. Developed as a less restrictive alternative to involuntary hospitalization, AOT focuses on individuals at risk of clinical deterioration or rehospitalization because they do not voluntarily comply with prescribed treatment.

Children and youth involved with the child welfare system frequently have behavioral health conditions and are high users of behavioral health services compared to children and youth in other Medicaid eligibility categories.

This issue brief summarizes analyses of Medicare fee-for-service data examining beneficiary use of tele-behavioral health services during 2019 and 2020. Results demonstrate that the number of Medicare beneficiaries receiving behavioral health care via telehealth increased dramatically during the COVID-19 public health emergency.

The calculation of behavioral health quality measures at the clinic level holds great promise for monitoring clinic performance over time, and for providing information for clinics to use to revise their processes and procedures to improve their performance.

Increasing availability of linked child welfare and Medicaid data can advance research on the intersections of child welfare and Medicaid. The project, Child and Caregiver Outcomes Using Linked Data (CCOULD), developed a research-use dataset combining child welfare records and Medicaid claims for children and families involved in child welfare systems in Florida and Kentucky.

This brief describes progress in the Child Welfare and Health Infrastructure for Linking and Data Analysis of Resources, Effectiveness, and Needs (CHILDREN) Initiative, which is entering its second year. At this time, four jurisdictions have been selected for participation in the CHILDREN Initiative and are engaging in feasibility studies to determine readiness for linking data.

This research brief uses claims data from the Medicaid and Children's Health Insurance Programs to examine the behavioral health diagnoses and treatment services received by children and youth involved with the child welfare system in 2019.

Team-based behavioral health care can effectively address clinical needs and mitigate behavioral health workforce shortages. Despite the demonstrated benefits of team-based care models, experts in the fields of behavioral health workforce and network adequacy have noted that existing reimbursement models do not adequately support team-based care.

Despite the increasing evidence of high suicide rates and associated risk factors for older adults in the United States, the number of programs addressing these risk factors remains limited.

Zero Suicide is a system-wide approach for health systems to improve the quality and safety of care for those at risk of suicide, with the underlying goal of preventing all suicide deaths among patients. Although evidence has indicated that Zero Suicide is effective in reducing suicide-related outcomes, little is known about how organizations fund and sustain the Zero Suicide initiative.