Impact of New York State's Health Home Model on Health Care Utilization.

The Affordable Care Act established Medicaid health homes to provide care management and coordination for high-need individuals, including many with serious mental illness. The authors used data from the Medicaid Data Warehouse to examine health care utilization over 3 years among 10,193 individuals who enrolled in a New York State health home and had at least one outpatient mental health visit during the year prior to enrollment. Results for postenrollment year 2 indicated a 43% decrease in inpatient mental health discharges, a 38% decrease in substance use discharges, and a 7% reduction in general medical discharges, whereas mental health outpatient treatment and behavioral and nonbehavioral medication utilization increased.

Pregnant and Postpartum People with Substance Use Disorders: Understanding the Obstetrical Care Provider' s Roles and Responsibilities.

Peripartum individuals with substance misuse are a high-risk population that challenge clinicians and child welfare specialists alike. Federal legislation was updated in 2016 with the Comprehensive Addiction Recovery Act (CARA) to improve care via expanded screening and treatment referrals for peripartum women with substance misuse. The implementation of CARA requires providers to update their policies and procedures in order to meet the requirements outlined by this legislation.

Treatment of Serious Mental Illness in Medical and Mental Health Settings.

Objective: This study investigated service use by individuals with serious and nonserious mental illness receiving mental health care in medical and mental health settings.

Methods: Claims data from the New York State Medicaid Data Warehouse were examined for 8,988 patients who received at least one mental health service at an urban academic medical center during 2017 at a mental health setting, a medical setting, or both.

Results: Most patients (59%) received all of their mental health care in medical settings and from unaffiliated providers, including a large portion (16%) with serious mental illness.

Marriage education for clinicians.

The field of marriage education has come to be dominated by nonprofessionals with no clinical training because clinicians interested in relationships typically provide marital therapy to couples in distress rather than marriage education to healthy couples. In this paper, we encourage clinicians to participate in the development of marriage education programs, such as that described by our Supporting Healthy Marriage program, which serves a large number of low-income couples, and propose a psychological conceptual framework for delivering marriage education services. It makes sense for clinicians to consider using this novel approach given the opportunity to impact such a large segment of society that might not receive psychological services.

Substance use disorders and employability among welfare recipients.

The 2006 welfare reform legislation (Deficit Reduction Act of 2005) imposed more stringent work requirements and defined the amount of time cash assistance recipients are allowed to be exempted from the work requirement because of substance use treatment. As there is little empirical literature on the employability of substance users, it is difficult to know whether it is realistic to expect individuals with substance use disorders to meet the increased work requirement. Based on a comprehensive evaluation of nearly 9,000 substance-misusing welfare recipients from 2001 to 2007, University Behavioral Associates (UBA) Comprehensive Services Model program in Bronx, New York, found that 60% of recipients were not exempted from the work requirement owing to substance misuse at the outset, and an additional 24% were found nonexempt after 3 months of intensive outpatient treatment coupled with case management, resulting in a total of 84% of the UBA clients not being exempted from the work requirement because of substance misuse by Day 90.

Subtyping of substance use disorders in a high-risk welfare-to-work sample: a latent class analysis.

The goals of this study were (a) to investigate the existence of substance abuse/dependence subtypes in a diverse low-income welfare to work sample and (b) to explore subtype differences in rates of comorbid psychiatric and medical conditions. Data for all demographic and clinical variables were extracted from deidentified case records of 4,977 clients enrolled in a comprehensive case management program for welfare recipients with substance use disorders. Latent class analysis supported a five-class model made up of a multiple abuse/dependence class (n = 1,133), a cocaine/alcohol class (n = 2,120), an opioids class (n = 1,346), a cannabis class (n = 362), and a small polysubstance/none primary class (n = 16).

Gastric bypass in a low-income, inner-city population: eating disturbances and weight loss.

Objective: To examine the prevalence of eating disturbances and psychiatric disorders among extremely obese patients before and after gastric bypass surgery and to examine the relationship between these disturbances and weight outcomes.

Research Methods And Procedures: Sixty-five women patients (ages 19 to 67) with a mean BMI of 54.1 were assessed by semistructured psychiatric interview before surgery and by telephone interview after surgery (mean follow-up: 16.