Reports

On January 1, 2022, the surprise billing provisions of the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2021 - commonly referred to as the No Surprises Act - go into effect. Surprise billing occurs when a privately insured individual receives an unexpected bill either in an emergency situation or when a service in an in-network facility is provided by an out-of-network provider.

Network adequacy is often defined as having enough providers within a health plan network to ensure reasonable and timely access to care. At a minimum, health plans should include a sufficient number of providers who deliver mental health and substance use disorder (SUD) services (collectively referred to in this report as behavioral health services) to support access to those services.

This Data Point presents current estimates of uninsured rates among early care and education workers (ECE), which includes individuals employed by Head Start, childcare center providers, and preschools. These populations have lower incomes on average and often lack access to benefits, including health coverage, commonly received by teachers in the K-12 system and post-secondary schools.

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.

Federal surveys relied on by researchers and policymakers for estimates of the uninsured population have been disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic, potentially influencing the accuracy of their estimates. This report analyzes evidence from a variety of data sources, including surveys and administrative data, which collectively indicate that the number of uninsured people in the U.S.

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 brief identifies emerging literature on the impacts and implications of the COVID-19 pandemic on household arrangements as well as considerations for how to best serve multiple individuals and families under one roof during the pandemic and in the future.Related Products:

This resource guide for providers working with American Indian/Alaska Native people reentering their communities from incarceration, contains a compilation of federal resources, research, examples, and helpful considerations for facilitating a successful reentry. Related Products:

Based on interviews with 12 individuals with experience designing, providing, and receiving training and technical assistance (TA), this brief outlines six elements necessary for creating engaging training and TA, summarizes how designers and providers might measure recipients’ engagement, and presents concrete strategies for providers to make training and TA engaging.

Based on interviews with 12 individuals with experience designing, providing, and receiving training and technical assistance (TA), this two page document summarizes four questions and related strategies for training and TA designers to consider to improve the likelihood that training and TA will engage potential recipients and their communities equitably.

In 2016, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services finalized its Guidelines for Regulatory Impact Analysis under the leadership of its Assistant Secretary for Planning Evaluation and Analytics Team. The Guidelines discuss strategies for characterizing the uncertainty in quantified effects as well as the potential impacts of non-quantified effects.

Many stakeholders and steps are involved in the life cycle of a prescription drug as it moves from chemical synthesis and formulation through dispensing or administration to patients. The specific steps involved in prescription drug supply chains often differ depending on the type of drug, the channel of distribution, and the patient’s source of prescription drug coverage.

This report provides an introduction to the supply chain for COVID-19 relevant medical devices and related challenges faced in ramping up their production during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Drug shortages are a persistent public health problem in the United States and in other countries. Shortages can have important implications for the health care systems and pharmacies that purchase, store, and dispense drugs and for the patients who rely on the availability of drugs to treat and prevent disease.

This report describes the current state of Patient-Centered Outcomes Research (PCOR) data infrastructure resources related to Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities (ID/DD), highlights data issues in the ID/DD research landscape that require more research, and identifies opportunities to enhance data infrastructure to improve PCOR for ID/DD. Related Products:

Human services programs can implement recruitment and retention strategies to increase father engagement and participation in services to promote child and family well-being. When included in programming, fathers have the opportunity to expand their valuable role in their families and help generate positive child and family outcomes.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, many human services organizations, including fatherhood programs, adapted their engagement approaches as the needs of the people they serve changed.

Child support payments are associated with increased parent-child engagement, which can lead not only to better academic and social outcomes for children but also to better parent-child and parent-parent relationships. Moreover, child support payments lifted nearly three-quarters of a million families out of poverty in 2017.

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.

The purpose of this study is to identify associations between COVID-19 infections, hospitalizations, and deaths among Medicare fee-for-service (FFS) beneficiaries and the proportion of the population fully vaccinated at the county-level between January and May 2021.

This report extends the brief discussion of addressing international effects contained in the Department of Health and Human Service Guidelines for Regulatory Impact Analysis (2016). The purpose of this supplement is to expand that discussion and provide more detailed information on conducting such assessments. Related Products:

This Issue Brief reviews evidence on factors affecting enrollment in health coverage among uninsured populations, including take-up of Medicaid and subsidized Marketplace plans among eligible individuals.

As of September 13, 2021, three vaccines to prevent infection with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, are available in the United States. The Pfizer vaccine was granted full approval for use in individuals over the age of 16 by the U.S.

The objective of this report is to assess the current landscape of federal and federally funded health care data relevant to PCOR and economic analysis to identify gaps for data stewards, researchers, and future collection efforts.

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 provides a high level overview of the impact of COVID-19 on the development, emotional and behavioral health, social, and economic well-being of children and youth (ages birth to 24).Related Products:

The COVID-19 crisis has disparately harmed low-income households. Across the United States, systemic inequalities in employment, wage-earning, health, and well-being have been strained for sub-populations facing poverty or near-poverty conditions.

COVID-19 has impacted antimicrobial drug prescribing both directly, through COVID-19 treatment, and indirectly, through the reduced spread of illnesses for which antimicrobial drugs are commonly prescribed.

This infographic visualizes a framework for father engagement in human services, detailing key approaches and strategies used by programs, organizations, and systems.  Related Products:

This infographic defines "father engagement" and highlights ways programs, organizations, and systems play a role in promoting father engagement in services.  Related Products:

Fathers want to and can play an important role in their children’s lives, but too often human services programs have not focused on supporting dads. This brief identifies approaches and strategies at the program, organization, and system levels to strengthen engagement of fathers by human services programs. 

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:

In focus group discussions with 44 working parents receiving assistance from one or more federal programs, many parents shared the view that increasing earnings involves a number of risks. Participants described the sequence of possible risk events as follows:

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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Air ambulances are used to transport patients in critical situations from the scene of an injury or accident to hospitals, or between hospitals.

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.

President Biden’s Executive Order 14036, “Promoting Competition in the American Economy” (the Competition Executive Order), identifies a lack of competition as a key driver for problems across economic sectors.

Virtual human services delivery has the potential to improve long-standing disparities in service access and outcomes. This brief highlights emerging lessons from the field, identifying considerations for programs to advance equity across all elements of service delivery. Related Products

The COVID-19 pandemic and policy responses, including stay-at-home orders and expanded use of telework, disrupted data collection for major HHS data systems. This brief identifies the impact of the pandemic on 29 HHS statistical surveys and administrative data systems widely used by policymakers and the public.

This infographic illustrates the intersection of environmental justice with human services policies and programs. It presents key facts about how participants in human services programs are particularly affected by environmental injustice, and the ways in which these programs can help mitigate the effects of environmental issues, including climate change.

This tool was developed to assist states and local communities in braiding, blending, or layering multiple federal funding streams (for example, Head Start and the Child Care and Development Fund) to increase the supply of quality early care and education and increase access to comprehensive early childhood and family support services within a coordinated, comprehensive early childhood system a

This report develops an approach for valuing COVID-19 mortality and morbidity risk reductions based on the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Guidelines for Regulatory Impact Analysis. Valuing risk reductions associated with regulations or other policies that address the novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) presents major challenges.

Between 2011 and 2018, increasing numbers of infants were removed from their parents or caregivers. From 2011 to 2018 the number of infants entering foster care increased 24 percent reaching around 50,000 in 2018. This increase was nearly 13 times as much as the 1.8 percent increase in placements for other age groups .

Over the past 20 years, Medicare and many private payers have transitioned to policies known collectively as value based purchasing (VBP). The COVID-19 pandemic has had an unprecedented impact on health, health care, the economy, and our daily lives over the past 15 months.

This factsheet provides descriptive information on child care eligibility and receipt. Of the 12.8 million children eligible for child care subsidies under federal rules, 15 percent received subsidies. Of the 8.4 million children eligible for child care subsidies under state rules, 23 percent received subsidies. Poorer children were more likely to receive subsidies than less poor children.

As of August 4, 2021, 70.1 percent of U.S. adults have received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. However, vaccine coverage varies dramatically across the country, with vaccine coverage being less than 40 percent in a third of U.S. counties. Despite a sufficient supply of COVID-19 vaccines, daily vaccinations have dwindled in recent months.