Knowledge Sharing: Support for the Medicaid Medical Directors Network
With 72 million beneficiaries nationwide, Medicaid is our nation’s largest publicly sponsored health insurer. The backbone of America’s safety net, Medicaid is a unique state-federal partnership providing health coverage for low-income Americans. It covers one out of every three children in the United States and pays for almost 45 percent of births. On the other end of the life cycle, Medicaid covers about 14 percent of older people—but seven out of ten nursing home residents. Medicaid is central to the US healthcare system and, importantly, to patients and families.
That’s why we are delighted to announce that PCORI is now supporting the Medicaid Medical Directors Network (MMDN) as a Knowledge Award under our Eugene Washington PCORI Engagement Awards Program. PCORI Director Joe Selby, MD, MPH, will speak at the MMDN spring meeting this month.
Advancing Use of Evidence-based Care
MMDN provides a forum in which the physicians who advise states’ Medicaid directors exchange information on clinical policy and practice. In the network, they share ideas and best practices, focusing on the use of evidence-based care and services, assessment and improvement of healthcare quality, and redesign of healthcare delivery systems.
Our support of MMDN’s activities is a win-win situation. The network’s focus on advancing the use of evidence-based care complements PCORI’s mission to generate patient-centered comparative clinical effectiveness research that will help clinicians, patients, and other healthcare stakeholders, including Medicaid policy makers, reach better-informed health and healthcare decisions. Specifically, we expect this partnership to advance our strategic goals—particularly our commitment to increasing the amount of useful evidence available and speeding its implementation in the care of patients, including those in populations of special interest to PCORI.
Activities of Mutual Interest
We currently have projects in our portfolio that are of interest to Medicaid medical directors. For example:
- A project in Florida is examining care transitions for older, chronically ill patients who are Medicare beneficiaries. This project focuses on the critical, often confusing period when patients return home from the emergency department (ED). The study will examine whether community-based social and medical supports during the transition improve patients’ quality of life and decrease subsequent ED and hospital use.
- An Alabama team is examining whether use of easy-to-read adaptions of materials for pain education and cognitive behavioral therapy helps reduce both pain and depression in patients with low health literacy, and whether any reductions thus gained can be sustained.
- A study in Pennsylvania is comparing the effectiveness of nonsurgical interventions for lumbar spinal stenosis, a back condition common in older adults. This study will examine the outcomes for patients who undergo one of three treatments: the usual medications and/or injections, group exercise in a community setting, or hands-on therapy and rehabilitative exercises in a clinic.
Additional PCORI-funded projects relevant to Medicaid include studies examining depression, dementia, behavioral health, obesity, prenatal care, tobacco cessation, and diabetes.
Through a one-year contract, we will support in-person meetings of MMDN members, a series of webinars and conference calls, and an online forum for information exchange. In turn, the state Medicaid medical directors will provide us with their views on topics for comparative clinical effectiveness research and promising ways to inform Medicaid programs of research findings.
We look forward to sharing this information with you as this exciting project moves forward.