Our Work
A Report for the Department of Health Care Policy and Financing Conducted by CHI
Between 2012 and early 2017, I was part of a policy team at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) that helped to advise then-Secretary Sylvia Burwell on a wide range of health policy topics, including the best available evidence to combat the opioid epidemic.
It was an important task. Drug overdose deaths claimed more than 52,000 lives in the U.S. in 2015 alone, with more than 33,000 from opioids. To put that in perspective, at the peak of the AIDS epidemic in 1995, the disease claimed 51,000 lives.
Most states have turned to managed care to get their Medicaid costs under control — with varying levels of success. Colorado has a handful of programs that use elements of managed care. This report serves as an introduction to the issue.
President Donald Trump today declared opioid abuse a nationwide public health emergency and said his administration will take aggressive steps to address the epidemic’s causes and effects.
“It is time to liberate our communities from this scourge of drug addiction,” he said in a speech at the White House. “I am directing all executive agencies to use every appropriate emergency authority to fight the opioid crisis.”
I found my job at the Colorado Health Institute by typing “health policy Colorado” into Google.
CHI was the first search result. And in August 2013 it was looking for a research assistant.
The job description fit my skill set, and CHI seemed like the type of organization I wanted to work for. Most importantly, I had the same positive gut reaction that brought me from Boston to Denver after visiting my best friend at the University of Denver months earlier.
It’s been nearly four years since that lucky Google search.
Colorado’s Medicaid program — called Health First Colorado — provides health coverage for upwards of one fourth of Colorado’s population. And it’s about to undergo some major changes.
The evolution of the ACC. Since 2011, Colorado has been grappling with a seemingly paradoxical question: How do you improve the health of Medicaid members while reducing costs? Colorado’s response is called the Accountable Care Collaborative (ACC).
Analyzing the Next Phase of Medicaid’s Accountable Care Collaborative in Colorado
Analysis of the 2015 Healthy Kids Colorado Survey finds that lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) highschoolers in Colorado trail their heterosexual peers in seven important indicators of health.
More than half a million Coloradans live in a county with few or no treatment options for people suffering from opioid addiction.
The nation is in the midst of an epidemic of opioid addiction and overdose deaths, and Colorado is no exception. Medication-assisted treatment, or MAT, is a proven way to fight this epidemic. It’s an evidence-based approach recommended by a wide range of respected scientific sources for the treatment of addiction to opioids, a category of drug that derives from the opium poppy and includes prescription pain pills as well as heroin.