Dimension reduction of 911 Good Samaritan Laws: Drawing inferences from policy surveillance.

Background: 911 Good Samaritan Laws (GSLs) extend legal protection to people reporting drug overdoses who may otherwise be in violation of controlled substance laws. Mixed evidence suggests GSLs decrease overdose mortality, but these studies overlook substantial heterogeneity across states. The GSL Inventory exhaustively catalogs features of these laws into four categories: breadth, burden, strength, and exemption.

Wellness project implementation within Houston's Faith and Diabetes initiative: a mixed methods study.

Background: Faith-based health promotion has shown promise for supporting healthy lifestyles, but has limited evidence of reaching scale or sustainability. In one recent such effort, volunteers from a diverse range of faith organizations were trained as peer educators to implement diabetes self-management education (DSME) classes within their communities. The purpose of this study was to identify factors associated with provision of these classes within six months of peer-educator training.

Integrating Primary Care Into Community Mental Health Centres in Texas, USA: Results of a Case Study Investigation.

Introduction: Despite evidence that people with serious mental illness benefit from receiving primary care within mental health care settings, there is little research on this type of integration. The objective of this study was to characterize how providers and patients experienced implementation of primary care into specialty mental health services.

Methods: During site visits, study team members interviewed staff and conducted focus groups with patients at 10 United States community mental health centres then beginning to integrate primary into their practices.

Self-Reported Quality, Health, and Cost-Related Outcomes of Care Coordination Among Patients with Complex Health Needs.

Care coordination is an increasingly popular strategy to help patients with complex health conditions manage their diseases more effectively. The purpose of the current study was to assess associations between patient-reported receipt of care coordination and their experiences of health, health care quality, and cost-related outcomes. Regression analyses of data from 431 patients across 13 Texas providers indicate that patients who reported receiving care coordination had higher odds of perceiving having enough information about how to manage their conditions (OR 2.

Effect of Patient Care Coordination on Hospital Encounters and Related Costs.

Given high costs of hospital encounters, providers have increasingly turned to patient-centered health care programs to improve cost-effectiveness and population health for patients with high needs. Yet, evidence is mixed about program effectiveness. This pre-post comparative analysis assessed whether the number of hospital encounters and related costs decreased for patients who received care coordination services funded through Texas's 1115(a) Medicaid waiver incentive-based payment model, under which providers created new programs to improve care quality, population health, and cost-effectiveness.

Substance-use and sexual harm reduction strategies of methamphetamine-using men who have sex with men and inject drugs.

Research indicates that men who have sex with men (MSM), use methamphetamine, and inject drugs are at high risk of HIV infection and they employ multiple harm reduction strategies simultaneously to reduce that risk. In this study, we identified substances most commonly injected and harm reduction strategies most often employed by methamphetamine-using MSM, used latent class analysis (LCA) to identify patterns of harm reduction strategies, and differentiated MSM within each class by individual characteristics. We analyzed data from 284 participants who completed an online cross-sectional survey.