Our Work
Our Latest
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.
More than one of 15 (7.4 percent) Medicare prescriptions in Colorado is for opioids — prescription drugs such as codeine and oxycodone, data from 2014 show. That is 1.7 percentage points higher than the national rate.
Behavioral health is a hot topic in Colorado these days – and for good reason.
Suicide rates have reached an all-time high. The rate of opioid overdoses continues to climb. And in 2015, nine percent of Coloradans – or 440,000 residents – said they needed mental health care or counseling but did not get it, according to the Colorado Health Access Survey (CHAS).
In his State of the State address on Jan. 12, Gov. John Hickenlooper called for making the behavioral health system “easier to navigate, more efficient and more responsive.”
He noted strides in expanding access to coverage and integrating primary care and behavioral health. “But,” he added, “behavioral health demands our attention at all points … and not just as one-off efforts when problems get too big to ignore.”
This interactive dashboard displays Colorado’s ongoing struggle with one of the nation’s highest suicide rates. Trends are displayed by gender, region and method.
Colorado consistently ranks well nationally on health-related measures such as obesity and physical activity. But Colorado also is in the top 10 of a list no state wants to win — the highest rate of suicides.