Behavioral Health

This playbook aims to synthesize lessons learned and recommendations from existing resources, emergency management protocols, and interviews with federal program staff about responding to emergencies and disasters.

From 1999 through 2019, there were more than 840,000 drug overdose deaths in the United States. The crisis has continually evolved and escalated, including during the COVID-19 pandemic, when an estimated 93,000 persons lost their lives to drug overdose in 2020--approximately a 30% increase over the year prior.

Dual eligible beneficiaries are an important subset of the Medicare and Medicaid populations because they have a high prevalence of chronic conditions and disabilities, substantial care needs, and high health care and long-term services and supports (LTSS) utilization and costs.

This environmental scan presents a review and synthesis of approaches and strategies adopted by drug checking programs and existing evidence on their effectiveness in changing drug use attitudes, behavior, and health outcomes. It includes studies of drug checking programs across a variety of settings in the United States and internationally.

COVID-19 pandemic’s social restrictions have prompted a surge in the mental health needs of children of all ages. Nationwide 4.3 million children/adolescents have been diagnosed with COVID-19 as of August 2021, and many of them have returned to early childhood and school settings. Schools and early childhood programs have long been essential settings for delivery of mental health services.

In an effort to help build the evidence base around the social determinants of health (SDOH), the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE) engaged RAND in a project to evaluate the current evidence from programs and policies targeting SDOH and identify the SDOH research questions, data sources, and data gaps that might be used to develop an SDOH research agenda.

This brief discusses the perspectives of a group of working parents on receipt of federal benefits. Based on focus groups, it examines program design and implementation, participation barriers, and factors that could help working parents more readily reach financial independence. Highlights are:

The Family First Prevention Services Act (FFPSA) permits states to use title IV-E foster care funding for children placed in foster care with their parent in a licensed residential family-based treatment facility for substance abuse. However, few states currently use this funding, due to barriers such as competing priorities and lack of facilities.

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In accordance with Section 7062(a) of the SUPPORT Act, in 2019 HHS published the first Status Report on Protecting Our Infants Act Implementation Plan, which included activities through August 2018 on the identification, prevention and treatment of Neonatal Abstinence Syndrome (NAS) and opioid use disorder in pregnant women.