Health & Medicine and our Center for Long-Term Care Reform have long been committed to improving the way older adults in Illinois live and enjoy their final years with dignity in their homes and communities. With a new administration in place, Health & Medicine intends to take action to ensure that aging issues are prioritized by the new Pritzker administration, as well as advocating nationally for adequate funding and rational policies to support home and community-based services and supports. To that end, we are pleased to share our Aging in Illinois: 2019 Agenda for Change. The Agenda highlights five issues—workforce,Medicaid managed care, nursing home safety and accountability, livable communities for all, growing population of aging immigrants—based on their overall importance and potential for immediate impact.

In this webinar from the Illinois ACEs Response Collaborative, Dr. Carole Warshaw, of the National Center on Domestic Violence, Trauma, and Mental Health, and Gwendolyn Packard of the National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center discuss the intersection between opioid usage and intergenerational trauma.

This working paper offers a brief history of Medicaid funding for behavioral health, describes home- and community-based services waivers, the Medicaid Rehabilitation Option and its implementation in Illinois, and capitated managed care, all with an eye toward unintended consequences and unexpected, though often predictable, reactions of stakeholders to Medicaid payment policies.

From early planning conversations that set the stage for the Learning Collaborative to recent planning to test new methods for hospital transitional care, data exchange has consistently emerged as a major challenge to implementing integrated models and improving services for people with mental illness and substance use disorder. This policy brief lays out challenges and potential solutions to data exchange in an integrated environment.

Health & Medicine Policy Research Group launched its Behavioral Health-Primary Care Integration Learning Collaborative in 2015. The Learning Collaborative set up a Hospital Transitional Care Workgroup to focus on the potential to improve outcomes for individuals returning to the community after inpatient behavioral health hospital admissions. After many in-depth discussions, the Workgroup began collecting data on hospital transitions. This data collection project concentrated attention on the processes of transitional care, where they breakdown, and how they may be improved. This paper summarizes the Workgroup’s conclusions.

This review assesses the current landscape of state-level legislation to understand how childhood adversity is currently addressed in policies, focusing on state-level legislation across the country that incorporated ACEs, trauma, and trauma-informed care. We hope this scan will be the first step in monitoring not only areas for growth in policy, but to also discover new ideas for potential pieces of legislation and collaboration across sectors and state lines.

Distilling feedback and insight from Learning Collaborative members, this paper offer our broad perspective on the policy needs for integration, focusing on three key areas related to integrated primary care and behavioral health in Illinois: 1)Building capacity by reforming regulations and reimbursement; 2) Supporting data systems and information exchange, and; 3) Developing an adequate workforce for integrated care.