Predictive Analytics and the Future of Jail Health Care
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New Papers Highlight ACA’s Impacts on Correctional Health Care System
Letter from the president of 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
‘Troubling’ Use of Solitary in Federal Prisons
March 16, 2015 By Cara Tabachnick
Inmates in the federal prison system who suffer from mental illness are routinely kept in solitary confinement for extensive periods without proper treatment, according to the first-ever audit of the Bureau of Prison’s (BOP) segregation policies.
The 250-page-plus report, completed in December, but not made public until now, detailed numerous areas in which the BOP was failing its mentally ill inmates, but did not offer concrete solutions on how to alleviate the use of solitary confinement….
….A copy of the audit was obtained by The Crime Report. Among the most disturbing findings were:
- A large number of inmates in solitary confinement need mental health treatment, but aren’t receiving it;
- No protocol exists to identify inmates with mental illness who should be kept out of solitary confinement;
- Inmates often receive a mental health diagnosis by medical students or interns who are not trained in psychiatry. Once diagnosed, they rarely receive follow-up reassessments or proper medication;
- No reentry programs or means of tracking for inmates coming out of segregation exist.
The audit was conducted over a period of two years after Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) chaired the first ever hearing on segregation in the nation’s jails and prisons before the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Human Rights in 2012. Read the FULL Article with links to the report here