Autism Research: Strengths and Needs in New Jersey

Future Visions is a pilot program through the NJ Department of Children and Families, Children’s System of Care, and offers intensive mobile treatment services for families who have high-needs children/youth aged 5-20 with intellectual and developmental disabilities. The program aims to provide extensive wrap around services to stabilize the children/youth in their homes while building skillsets that advance the goals of independent and productive living and community integration. The Center for State Health Policy, collaborating with the A.J. Drexel Autism Institute, and the Rutgers Boggs Center on Developmental Disabilities, will lead a two-part evaluation of the pilot program including a process evaluation that will examine the provider implementation of the Future Visions model and an outcome evaluation which will assess the impact of the intervention on the participating youth and their families across a range of measures. This project is funded by the NJ Department of Children and Families.

The New Jersey Division of Medical Assistance and Health Services (DMAHS) is consistently exploring opportunities to advance quality improvement initiatives, working with managed care organizations (MCOs) to improve the Medicaid program’s service delivery. The goal of this project is for the Center for State Health Policy to provide analytic support to assess possible quality improvement incentives for the MCOs using the Medicaid auto assignment process which occurs when an enrollee fails to select an MCO at the time of enrollment. The Center, working closely with Mercer and DMAHS, will identify candidate metrics, including documentation, data sources and assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of each metric as well as the feasibility and minimum threshold requirements to inform performance management design strategies. This project is funded by the NJ Department of Human Services.