Predictive Analytics and the Future of Jail Health Care

From my inbox to yours!

Dear Colleague:

From its inception, Community Oriented Correctional Health Services (COCHS) has viewed connectivity not only as a way to link justice-involved people to services but also as a way to link people in the criminal justice and health care sectors to information.

COCHS CIO Ben Butler is an expert on the myriad issues involved in creating information connectivity between criminal justice and health care. With the rise of big data come new opportunities for magnifying the power of information technology. In a new issue paper, Predictive Analytics in Criminal Justice and Health Care: Three Case Studies, Ben examines how health care providers are working with criminal justice providers to use predictive analytics for reducing incarceration, improving health, and maintaining public safety. Although this work is still in its early stages, the kinds of initiatives discussed in Ben’s paper will no doubt someday be the norm.

Meanwhile, Health Affairs, the nation’s leading health policy journal, recently published Ben’s letter suggesting that jails offer an interesting opportunity to test the efficacy of health information exchange (HIE) for improving the health of a very vulnerable population.

As you know, COCHS has widely disseminated the message that significant numbers of people in jail are there because of untreated behavioral health problems. When these problems continue to go untreated in jail, they can lead to behavior that causes inmates to wind up in solitary confinement, where conditions are even more detrimental to mental health issues.

Last week, Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote an important concurring opinion for Davis v. Ayala, in which he noted the “human toll wrought by extended terms of isolation” and the inadequacy of current judicial mechanisms for determining the role of solitary confinement in inmate sentencing. Citing COCHS collaborator Dr. Homer Venters, Justice Kennedy wrote that recent research detailing the psychological toll of confinement on inmates challenges us to re-examine the way we view punishment.

With his concurrence, Justice Kennedy has opened the door for the Supreme Court to examine the conditions of confinement and the effects of these conditions on inmates’ mental health. Justice Kennedy foresees a time when the judiciary will “determine whether workable alternative systems for long-term confinement exist, and, if so, whether a correctional system should be required to adopt them.”

With your help, we have brought these alternative systems closer to becoming a reality.

Steven Rosenberg

President, COCHS

New Papers Highlight ACA’s Impacts on Correctional Health Care System

Letter from the president of COCHS cochs

Dear Colleague,

With the passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in 2010, Community Oriented Correctional Health Services (COCHS) recognized the potentially huge implications of parity and Medicaid expansion for the criminal justice system. We have published several papers on these issues, all of which are available on our website at: www.cochs.org.

But the ACA is having other, less widely recognized impacts as well, most notably by driving the creation of consumer-driven health care systems within correctional settings, as well as the establishment of payment arrangements based on value instead of volume.

Two new papers from COCHS address these developments in depth:

Consumer Rights Come to Jail: How the Affordable Care Changes the Rights of Individuals Pending Disposition, by COCHS General Counsel Daniel J. Mistak, describes how the ACA endows individuals pending disposition with new consumer rights — and the implications of those rights.

Development of a Performance-Based RFP for Correctional Health Care Services in Vermont, by COCHS Research Associate Ben Watts, is a case study of how a state correctional health care system created a new performance-based contractual model in alignment with state and federal health reforms.

I think you will find both these reports very informative. I encourage you to read them and share them with your colleagues.

Best wishes,

Steven Rosenberg

President, COCHS

Nearly all Denver jail inmates in high-risk unit have brain trauma

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Neurological researchers from the University of Denver expected to find an above-average prevalence of brain trauma at the Downtown Detention Center. But the results were high enough to shock them.

Nearly every inmate screened — 96 percent — had a traumatic brain injury. That’s significantly higher than national statistics showing from 67 percent to 80 percent of inmates in jails and prisons have a traumatic brain injury, and far higher than the estimated 6 percent to 8.5 percent of the general population. Click here to read the whole article

House sends fast-tracked mental health bill to Gov. Inslee: SB 5889

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A bill to establish a 14-day deadline for mental-health evaluations of people charged in crimes passed the Washington Legislature on Monday and is headed to Gov. Jay Inslee for his signature.

A bipartisan group of House members passed the measure 84-14.

Washington is defending a class-action lawsuit…

More about the Senate Bill 5889 here

California prisons have released 2,700 inmates under Prop. 47

Released Prisoners Causing Increased Crime Rate?

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California’s prisons have released 2,700 inmates after their felonies were reduced to misdemeanors under a ballot measure that voters approved in November, easing punishment for some property and drug crimes. The mass inmate release over the past four months under Proposition 47 has resolved one of the state’s most ingrained problems: prison overcrowding, state prisons chief Jeffrey Beard told a Senate committee at a legislative hearing Thursday. Prop. 47 has allowed the state to comply with a court-ordered inmate reduction mandate a year ahead of schedule, Beard said.

Incarcerated More Likely to Suffer Chronic Illness and Infectious Disease (hello)

Report: Incarcerated People More Likely to Suffer from Chronic Illness and Infectious Disease Than Public

The federal Bureau of Justice Statistics released a new report (PDF) this month on the health of incarcerated people in state and federal lock-ups from 2011-12. The study focused on both prisoners (i.e. people serving longer sentences) and jail inmates (i.e. people awaiting trial or serving shorter sentences), and found they were not only more likely to have had chronic medical conditions and/or infectious disease than the general population, but were also often denied prescription medication after admission. The report also mentions that incarcerated women and prisoners over 50 suffered at disproportionately higher rates from chronic and infectious medical conditions than the rest of the population.