These policy recommendations are not exhaustive but rather present the beginning of a roadmap for Illinois to formally re-value a role that represents an essential provider role in COVID-19 response and in improving overall community health.

Since 2014, Health & Medicine’s Court-Involved Youth Project has worked to address the comprehensive health needs of youth returning to their communities from the juvenile justice system while expanding the capacities of the providers who serve them. This resource guide represents a summary of key learnings from this work—capturing insights from both providers and youth. We hope that it helps the many organizations and systems dedicated to improving care for vulnerable young people to both begin and advance in their efforts to offer comprehensive, youth-affirming care.

The Center for Long-Term Care Reform has been monitoring and responding to the roll out of managed care in Illinois Medicaid since the launch of the managed long-term services and supports in 2010. Early in the process of transitioning to managed care, we advocated for transparency, consumer protections, and quality assurance. As managed care has matured and expanded to new areas and populations, notably to include newly eligible ACA enrollees, we have turned our attention to the capacity of managed care to reduce disparities and achieve health equity. This paper describes one managed care plan's experience with addressing health equity based reform.

The Medicare Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program began four years ago, and has attracted both support for its overall efficacy and criticism for its impact on safety net hospitals. Meanwhile, state Medicaid programs are using readmissions as a performance measure for hospitals and for managed care plans. This paper compares the federal HRRP with Illinois Medicaid’s Potentially Preventable Readmissions Program, and asks what Illinois can learn from the successes and shortcomings of the federal program.

On September 7, 2016, Health & Medicine staff attended a meeting jointly hosted by the Center for Community Health Equity and Health & Medicine’s Health Equity Initiative, to help advise the Chicago Department of Public Health’s (CDPH) Department of Epidemiology on how to both accurately and reliably measure experiences of racism in Chicago. The recommendations and notes in this report are intended to help advance CDPH’s work toward accurately measuring racism, and ultimately aiding in the process of confronting structural racism and advancing toward achievement of health equity in Chicago.

This webinar--presented by Kavitha Selvaraj, MD, MPH, MAEd, FAAP with Audrey Stillerman, MD, and Stan Sonu, MD--explores lessons learned from Universal Screening for Toxic Stress During Well-Child Visits, a multi-site ACE screening project.

In late 2016, Health & Medicine completed new research on the Cook County Safety Net in partnership with Loyola and others to capture how state and federal health reform efforts have impacted Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs), free and charitable clinics (FCCs), and hospitals in Cook County. This study was unique from others that examine the safety net in that it intentionally asked participants to discuss both the anticipated effects and the unintended consequences of health reform implementation.