Randomized Trial of Interventions for Smoking Cessation Among Medicaid Beneficiaries With Mental Illness.

Objective: Medicaid beneficiaries with severe mental illnesses are a financially disadvantaged group with high rates of smoking and poor cessation outcomes. This study examined whether abstinence-contingent monetary incentives improved outcomes when added to cessation treatments at community mental health centers: prescriber visit for pharmacotherapy only (PV only), prescriber visit and facilitated quitline (PV+Q), and prescriber visit and telephone cognitive-behavioral therapy (PV+CBT).

Methods: During 2012-2015, a total of 1,468 adult, daily smoking Medicaid beneficiaries with mental illnesses received Web-based motivational tobacco education.

Public-academic partnerships: a program to improve the quality of antipsychotic prescribing in a community mental health system.

State mental health authorities can use public-academic partnerships to create professional roles in which leaders can track trends, identify problems, and carry out quality improvement projects to address key issues. Leaders with positions in both academic institutions and state mental health authorities ensure access to resources, technical expertise, and key relationships to improve quality. The authors describe a public-academic partnership in New Hampshire and a quality improvement program it carried out.