Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Roundtable: State-University Partnerships: Generating Evidence to Support State Health Policymaking

(Health Policy)

Since the passage of the Affordable Care Act, states have become even more focused on efforts to improve health and healthcare, particularly for low-income, vulnerable populations. We know that policymakers tend to be higher users of research for decision making when they interact with the research process in the context of research-policy networks. State-University Partnerships, collaborations between a state governmental entity (generally Medicaid) and a state-related university research center, support the important dialogue needed to generate timely and relevant evidence for state policymaking. This roundtable will feature three leaders from partnerships that are participating in AcademyHealth’s State-University Partnership Learning Network. They will provide examples of policy and data analyses they are conducting for their respective states; discuss how state policymakers have used their studies; highlight issues related to data collection, linkage, and analytic methodologies; and offer insights into the challenges, opportunities, and overall value of participating in such partnerships. Featured studies being conducted by the roundtable participants will focus on critically important populations for state policy-making. Cynthia Woodcock, Executive Director of The Hilltop Institute at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, will discuss their work on Medicare-Medicaid dual eligibles for Maryland. Joel Cantor, Distinguished Professor and Director of the Center for State Health Policy at Rutgers University, will highlight their analyses of high-need, high-cost “super-utilizers” for New Jersey and the state’s response to their findings. Julie Donohue, Associate Professor and Vice Chair for research at the Department of Health Policy and Management in the Graduate School of Public Health at the University of Pittsburgh, will speak about their work for Pennsylvania focusing on the opioid and heroin abuse and overdose epidemic. While the importance of findings from these specific studies cannot be underestimated, a critical aspect of the value of these partnerships is the ability for these university researchers to become more sophisticated data users in the context of an extraordinarily complex and rapidly evolving area of state policy development. As state policymakers seek to address non-medical determinants of health outcomes and Medicaid cost, there is a growing understanding of the importance of reaching across previously-existing silos of data related to the same individual. Data linkages and matched data sets are becoming essential to gain a full understanding of an individual’s holistic needs and how they are (or are not) currently accessing vital services. While even linking Medicare and Medicaid claims data is challenging, it is crucial to build even more complex data warehouses that include additional data sets from other sources such as vital statistics, clinical data from health information exchanges, nursing home information, multi-payer claims databases, along with data from other social services (e.g., education, housing, and nutrition). Partnerships can help support the creation and use of these merged data sets to help state policymakers gain important insights into the increasingly complex health and social welfare system.