CHI Visits Innovative Clinics in Montrose and Lamar

Three CHI team members are spending Monday and Tuesday with the folks at the Northside Child Health Center in Montrose for the next research brief in the Colorado Health Report Card series.

Natalie Triedman, Tamara Keeney and Brian Clark are visiting the health care center, which is located in Northside Elementary School, to learn more about how children receive both physical and mental health care at the school-based clinic.

Natalie and Tamara will be joined by Joe Hanel on Thursday when they visit the High Plains Community Health Center in Lamar for the same project. High Plains Community Health Center is a federally qualified health center serving patients from southeastern Colorado. It offers physical health, oral health and behavioral health care in one setting.

Leslie Chadwick from the Colorado Health Foundation, our partner on the Colorado Health Report Card project, is participating in both trips with the CHI team.

In other work, Jeff Bontrager is busy with his team preparing for next week’s Safety Net Advisory Committee meeting.

The Safety Net Advisory Committee (SNAC) Learning Lab on Thursday, May 28, will focus on oral health and the Medicaid Accountable Care Collaborative.

Now that all Medicaid enrollees have dental benefits, thanks to Colorado’s decision to offer dental benefits to adults, next week’s SNAC Lab will explore how oral health is being incorporated in the ACC’s model of care coordination and how ACC clients are accessing oral health services.

Jeff, Hannah Wear and Sara Schmitt have been meeting with medical and oral health stakeholders in preparation for the discussion and will be presenting their findings, including new analysis of the impact of the adult dental benefit on dentists’ participation in Medicaid.

 In addition, CHI will present findings from a new survey of safety net providers on the provision of – and demand for – oral health care among the most vulnerable Coloradans.

Two papers based on data from the Colorado Health Access Survey (CHAS) will be published in the next few weeks. The first examines whether barriers to accessing health care differ by location in Colorado. The second looks at Spanish speakers – defined by the CHAS as people who speak Spanish at home – and how they access and use health care in Colorado.

CEO Michele Lueck and Amy Downs, senior director for policy and analysis, will attend the meeting of the Colorado Commission on Affordable Health Care’s research committee on Thursday morning. CHI has been contracted by the commission to provide data and analysis to support the work.

In case you missed it, CHI published “New Models for Integrating Behavioral Health and Primary Care: Lessons from Six Colorado Health Care Providers” last week. The study’s lead author, Anna Vigran, joined Michele in Denver at a National Governors Association meeting focused on the health care workforce to present CHI’s findings.

In addition, we posted our 2015 Bill Tracking List from the session, a look at the 65 health-related bills we watched. Joe wrote about the list in his blog, noting that split control of the House and Senate led to wide partisan splits on many issues, including health-related issues, this year.

Finally, we hope that you read a blog by Sara Schmitt on how the state’s legislators dealt with marijuana-related bills during the session.