Introducing Our New Licensing Director & Agency CMO
Please join me in welcoming Cara Christ, MD as our new Division of Licensing Services chief. Cara has agreed to share her talents as the new Assistant Director for Licensing as well as serving as the Agency Chief Medical Officer. Also, thanks a million to Colby Bower who's been doing an excellent job serving as interim director for licensing since Alan passed away. Cara started her [...]
Essential Benefit Package 101
The future health insurance exchange under the Affordable Care Act will need to offer an Essential Benefit Package. In fact, most health insurance plans will need to cover each state’s Essential Benefit Package starting New Year’s Day in 2014. There are 10 key service categories that future plans will need to cover- including behavioral health services. States need to pick a plan from [...]
Health Insurance Exchanges
The Affordable Care Act (aka health care reform) will establish health insurance exchanges in each state- providing folks (and small business employees) an opportunity to get health insurance coverage starting 1/1/14. The future exchanges will provide competitive marketplaces for folks to directly compare and buy private health insurance based on price, quality, and other things. The law gives states some flexibility in [...]
Citizenship, Benefits & Services
Many of our Stakeholders and the folks that we serve have asked about how Arizona and Federal laws affect the kinds of services that the ADHS provides. The answer is (of course) “it depends.” It depends on what kind of benefit or service you’re talking about. Tom Salow, Lynn Golder and others have put together a fact sheet on our [...]
Evidence Based Practice x (Training + Teamwork) = Results
We’ve been implementing an evidence-based practice called Non-Violent Crisis Intervention as our operational model at the AZ State Hospital for the last few months- and we’re already seeing dramatic results. It's a best practice for early intervention and de-escalation created by the Crisis Prevention Institute. It’s based on teamwork and training. By using a cohesive team that’s fully engaged in all aspects [...]
Public Health’s National Archive
A new public health archive called CDC Stacks opened their on-line doors this week. CDC Stacks contains documents spanning the history of CDC from issue 1 of the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report to the most current CDC guidelines and recommendations. The library is at http://stacks.cdc.gov. Dig in- or at least put it in your Favorites.