Recovery: Establishment of a Center of Excellence in Research on Disability Services and Care Coordination and Integration

THIS NOTICE IS PROVIDED FOR INFORMATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY. THIS OPPORTUNITY WAS AVAILABLE ONLY TO CONTRACTORS UNDER THE DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES, PROGRAM SUPPORT CENTERS 2009 TASK ORDER CONTRACTORS. A Cost-Plus Fixed Fee, 2 year contract was awarded on May 4, 2010 by the Office on Disability in the Office of the Secretary, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) under funds from the Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 to Mathematica Policy Review, Inc. This project will establish a Center of Excellence in Research on Disability Services and Care Coordination and Integration. Its purpose is to build the foundation and infrastructure necessary to conduct CER on systems of care for people with disabilities. The Center will be operated by Mathematica Policy Research, Inc. (DHHS and managed by Rosaly Correa-de-Araujo, MD, MSc, PhD, Deputy Director of the HHS Office on Disability, who also serves as the Contracting Officer Technical Representative and Scientific Lead/Advisor for the project. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services will serve as a federal partner on this project. The Center will be charged with building the infrastructure necessary to carry out research on the effectiveness and comparative effectiveness of services provided to individuals with disabilities. Specifically, the Center will: * Work with the CCW to document the public data available from CMS, identify and interpret data gaps, and support HHS agencies in making necessary data improvements to better reflect information on health and support services for people with disabilities to be used for CER studies. * Expand the CCW created by CMS by linking existing sources to other data sets thereby increasing the ability to use CCW for research on people with disabilities including CER of health and support services for chronic care, including systems of care. * Conduct thorough reviews of HHS and outside efforts in research and evaluation of the effectiveness and/or comparative effectiveness of health and support services for people with disabilities. This must include a systematic review of published and unpublished studies or data. * Identify and compare the effectiveness of existing models of community-based care coordination and integration for people with disabilities. Determine best practices and to what extent support services, holistic approaches and health promotion interventions affect the health and well-being of people with disabilities. * Assess Medicaid data reported by a small number of selected states (4 to 6) on both their state plan and waiver services to identify the types of benefits offered, information reported and data available, and use these findings to propose ways to standardize some or certain services and reporting, i.e. generate greater consistency on how services are used or defined. This will facilitate the development of future CER studies. * Based on the assessment of Medicaid data from selected States as mentioned above, develop quality improvement pilot interventions that can be implemented by states to improve the quality of information reported and allow for comparative data analysis. This will facilitate the development of other future quality improvement strategies. * Develop and coordinate a Home and Community-Based Services (HCBS) taxonomy and/or a health care glossary relevant to providers, policymakers and people with disabilities. Consider the work of Thomson-Reuters and others in completing this task. * Develop a blueprint for continued and future research and data capacity-building in support of CER, and the translation and dissemination of research findings to providers, policymakers, and people with disabilities. * Develop and maintain a section of the Office on Disability's website to disseminate the Center's activities on CER. * Develop a plan to continually evaluate the impact of various products and activities of the Center. The main functions of the Center of Excellence in Research on Disability Services and Care Coordination and Integration will therefore be production, dissemination, implementation, evaluation, data collection and research. There are large areas of overlap between these functions, but the diverse needs of this contract require expertise in a wide range of areas including long-term care policy research and development including data collection and manipulation. Each of the inter-related functions is integral to the successful implementation of the contract.