In rural areas, providers and Medicaid enrollees may face additional barriers in providing or accessing telehealth, even within states that have adopted supportive telehealth policies. This is particularly the case during a public health emergency such as COVID-19. This article offers one of the earliest estimates of telehealth provision to pregnant Medicaid enrollees during COVID-19,…
Home-based medical care (HBMC) is an increasingly important model for delivering care to Medicaid beneficiaries with complex health needs. By bringing medical services directly to patients’ homes, HBMC has the potential to improve access to care while reducing hospitalizations, emergency department visits, and overall healthcare costs. This article explores Medicaid claims data to examine the…
Medicaid faces significant policy and funding changes that could affect access to primary care, raising questions about the stability of the clinician workforce serving Medicaid enrollees. However, fluctuations in Medicaid participation may reflect changes in patient enrollment rather than frequent decisions by clinicians to enter or leave the program. Understanding how primary care clinicians maintain…
Geographic disparities in healthcare access remain a persistent challenge in Medicaid, prompting growing interest in area-level measures that can help identify communities with the greatest unmet needs. Multidimensional socioeconomic indexes, such as the Social Vulnerability Index (SVI), may provide a more comprehensive way to target healthcare resources than traditional income-based measures alone. Understanding how these…
The Rural Health Transformation Program (RHTP) will invest $50 billion to strengthen healthcare access and workforce capacity in rural communities across the United States. As states develop proposals to access these funds, they need reliable data to understand the providers currently serving rural Medicaid populations and identify areas with workforce shortages. The US Medicaid Primary…
Over the past 25 years, research has consistently shown that nurse staffing levels and skill mix are critical to patient outcomes. Yet hospitals often underinvest in nurse staffing because nurse labor is treated as a cost rather than a source of revenue under the current payment system. To address this, the newly established Commission for…
Community Health Centers (CHCs) serve nearly 1 in 6 Medicaid enrollees and provide perinatal care to about 560,000 people, playing a critical role in prenatal and postpartum care for disadvantaged populations. While 41% of CHCs—often larger centers with multidisciplinary teams—offer prenatal care to higher proportions of non-White or non-English-speaking patients, little is known about the…
Appropriate prenatal care is critical to ensuring safe childbirth, but many populations face barriers that create inequities in maternal health outcomes. During the COVID-19 pandemic, telehealth emerged as a promising way to expand access, therefore driving its rapid adoption. This shift highlights the need to better understand the workforce providing telehealth for pregnancy care. This…
Burnout among community health center providers has worsened post-COVID-19, exacerbated by understaffing and heightened recruitment challenges due to competition from higher-paying hospitals and private practices. This article examines how 4 community health centers, recognized by their peers as leaders in addressing burnout and moral injury, are working to tackle these challenges.
Extensive research has established a strong link between overall nurse staffing levels and certain patient safety outcomes. In contrast, the impact of agency nurse staffing on patient outcomes has been studied less frequently, with inconsistent results. US studies examining agency hours often rely on cross-sectional designs, which, along with similarly limited research on overtime hours,…
