Tuesday, November 09, 2004

An Analysis of the Literature on Disease Management Programs
A report (in Adobe Acrobat format) from the Congressional Budget Office - "According to CBO’s analysis, there is insufficient evidence to conclude that disease management programs can generally reduce overall health spending. It is important to note that such programs could be worthwhile even if they did not reduce costs, but CBO’s analysis focused on the question of whether those programs could pay for themselves. The proposition that decreased use of acute care services might offset the costs of the screening, monitoring, and educational services in disease management programs is clearly appealing, but, unfortunately, much of the literature on those programs does not directly address health care costs. Instead, the focus is often on the processes of care or on intermediate measures of health, from which an overall impact on spending cannot reasonably be inferred. The few studies that report cost savings do so for controlled settings and generally fail to account for all health care costs, including the cost of the intervention itself. Furthermore, if disease management programs were applied to broader populations, the reported savings might not be attainable, and the programs could even raise costs. So while a few studies indicate that disease management programs could be designed to reduce overall health costs for select groups of patients (at least in the short term), little research directly addresses the issues that would arise in applying disease management to the older and sicker Medicare population."  
  

Comparison of Statewide Emergency Mental Health Preparedness Plans
Temple University press release, based on a recently completed pilot study of state mental health emergency preparedness plans - "State mental health services agencies were unprepared for the fear, anxiety and uncertainty felt by many in the days after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. In response, a detailed mental health emergency preparedness plan for every state was created with funding from the Centers for Disease Control and other government entities. Researchers from Temple University’s department of public health recently completed a pilot study of these plans for New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. The team found that the communication strategies for dealing with mental health needs, mechanisms for communicating with diverse populations and the communication assumptions about the states’ population distributions differed for each state. Their work uncovered each state’s communications strengths as well as areas where more strategic planning is needed."  
  

Many Utahns to lose mental health services
Story in the Deseret News - "Nearly 10 percent of poor Utahns who receive government mental health services could lose them because of changes in the federal rule over how Medicaid dollars are spent. In the next six months, a projected 4,332 residents — 825 of them children — will not receive treatment at the 11 public mental health centers across the state, administrators say. At Central Utah Counseling, 300 people who have received services for years have already been turned away because the center can only afford to treat those who are eligible under the joint state/federal Medicaid insurance plan."