Nadereh Pourat, associate director at the UCLA Center
for Health Policy Research and professor of health policy and management at the
UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, and Emmeline Chuang, professor at the UC Berkeley School
of Social Welfare and director at Berkeley’s Mack Center on Nonprofit and
Public Sector Management in the Human Services, have received a $200,000 grant from
the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF). The researchers will explore how
California counties responded to COVID-19 under the Whole Person Care (WPC)
Medicaid Pilot Program.
The
grant will expand on efforts to evaluate WPC, a Medicaid program launched in
2016 by the California Department of Health Care Services (DHCS), which aims to provide
coordinated health care and social services for patients with complex needs, such
as those who are homeless, have mental health and chronic conditions, or have
been recently incarcerated. Researchers will look at whether WPC improved
health outcomes and service delivery for enrolled patients. WPC findings will be
used to inform future efforts by service providers and policymakers to improve
Medicaid beneficiaries’ quality of care and health outcomes.
“WPC
pilots played a significant role in many California counties’ response to the COVID-19
pandemic by helping them leverage cross-sector relationships and resources such
as outreach providers and housing services,” said Pourat, who serves as the
lead evaluator of the WPC program under contract with the California DHCS. “The
program targets many at-risk populations including those who are homeless and
needed shelter or with complex conditions and needed extra support during the
lock-down.”
“Resources
are stretched thin during the pandemic,” said Chuang. “However, many pilots
have spent the last several years as a part of WPC, developing the necessary
data infrastructure and multidisciplinary teams to successfully communicate and
coordinate care across sectors. This puts them in a unique position to respond
to the COVID-19 pandemic.”
Their
study is one of five research grants that shared $2 million in new grant awards
announced by RWJF through their Systems for Action research program, looking at
findings and solutions across health care, public health, and social services
during the pandemic. Researchers hope that the findings will provide important
insight into how organizations from different sectors work together to improve
population health outcomes and health equity in the context of COVID-19.
Under
this grant, researchers will examine: (1) changes to WPC Pilot collaborative
networks in response to COVID-19; (2) variation across demographic groups in
the impact of COVID-19 on WPC enrollment, service utilization, and outcomes;
and (3) Pilot-level characteristics associated with improved outcomes for WPC
enrollees. The research team will conduct key informant interviews, examine
Medi-Cal claims and encounter data, and analyze existing survey data on
collaborative partnership networks. The study analyzes
data from network surveys, Medicaid claims data, and key-informant interviews
to assess program effectiveness from multiple perspectives, and will span two years, ending in
November 2022.
Systems for Action is a national research program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation
that aims to discover and apply new evidence about ways of aligning delivery
and financing systems across the medical, public health, and social services
sectors that support a “Culture of Health.
The
Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s mission is to improve health and health care
of all Americans and it is the nation’s largest philanthropy dedicated solely
to health.