2024

Barriers to Enrollment, Procedural Denials, and Loss of Medicaid Coverage: A Randomized Trial to Identify Effective Outreach Solutions

Researchers:
Location:
Wisconsin
Type:
  • Full project
Each year, millions of Medicaid beneficiaries must redemonstrate their eligibility to avoid losing coverage. Challenges with the required paperwork can result in eligible people losing their benefits for procedural reasons (i.e. because their paperwork was...

The Effect of English Language Training on Health and Health Care Utilization

Researchers:
  • Sumit Agarwal
  • Blake Heller
  • Kirsten Slungaard Mumma
Location:
Massachusetts
Type:
  • Pilot project
Adults with limited English proficiency may have difficulty navigating the complex bureaucracy of the U.S. health care system, leading to worse access and outcomes. We propose to examine the effect of English language training on health care utilization and...

2023

Improving Immigrant Mental Health with an AI-driven Mobile App

Researchers:
Location:
United States of America
Type:
  • Pilot project
Mental health conditions among low-income immigrants in the United States are likely triggered or worsened by their migration experience. Significant barriers to accessing healthcare services among this population may further contribute to the persistence of...

2022

Redetermination and ENrollment: Evidence at Work (RENEW)

Researchers:
  • Kevin Callison
  • Chris Frenier
  • Adrianna McIntyre
  • Jacob Wallace
Location:
Virginia
Type:
  • Full project
Take-up of safety net programs in the United States is often incomplete, ranging from 84% for SNAP and Medicaid adults to 25% for TANF. Administrative hassles involved with proving initial and continued eligibility, which often require substantial effort by...

Outreach and Maintenance of Medicaid Enrollment

Researchers:
  • Laura Dague
  • Allison Espeseth
  • Rebecca Myerson
Location:
Wisconsin
Type:
  • Full project
For many government safety net programs, beneficiaries must regularly demonstrate eligibility to avoid losing benefits. This project uses a field experiment to identify the effect of outreach strategy on beneficiaries’ maintenance of Medicaid enrollment. The...

2021

The Effects on Labor Organizing on Worker Welfare and Service Quality

Researchers:
  • Alex Hertel-Fernandez
  • Suresh Naidu
  • Adam Reich
  • Niharika Singh
  • Aaron Sojourner
  • Patrick Youngblood
Type:
  • Full project
We plan to evaluate the causal impact of labor organizing on worker welfare and service quality in the health care sector. Existing observational evidence suggests that unionization leads to increased staff retention and productivity among health care workers...

Treatment Choice and Outcomes for End Stage Renal Disease

Researchers:
Type:
  • Full project
Patients with End Stage Renal Disease (ESRD) account for 7% of Medicare fee-for-service spending despite making up less than 1% of the Medicare enrollment. For patients with ESRD, home dialysis, as opposed to facility-based dialysis, is often associated with...

App-Based Mindfulness Meditation

Researchers:
  • Pierre-Luc Vautrey
Type:
  • Pilot project
Many Americans, in particular low-income individuals, suffer from common mental illnesses such as depression or anxiety at one point in their lives without receiving any treatment. Besides direct consequences of mental illnesses on well-being, even moderate...

Encouraging Abstinence Behavior in a Drug Epidemic

Researchers:
Type:
  • Full project
Combatting the rise of the opioid epidemic is a central challenge of U.S. health care policy. A promising approach for improving welfare and decreasing medical costs of people with substance abuse disorders is offering incentive payments for healthy behaviors...

Reducing Nurse Burnout through Online Social Support

Researchers:
  • Elizabeth Linos
Already strained from high levels of burnout and secondary trauma in their normal caregiving activities, nurses are now facing immense Covid-19 related challenges that are likely to increase post-traumatic stress, anxiety, and burnout over the next few years...

2020

How Do Subsidies for Contraceptives Impact the Lives of Low Income Women?

Researchers:
  • Martha Bailey
  • Vanessa Dalton
  • Daniel Eisenberg
  • Vanessa Lang
  • Sarah Miller
Location:
Michigan
Type:
  • Full project
In the U.S., nearly half of pregnancies are unintended, and unintended pregnancies occur twice as often among poor women than in the U.S. population overall. The cost of effective contraception may be among the most important determinants of this disparity...

123-MOMS: RCT Evaluation of a Three-Phase Intervention on Maternal Mental Health and Child Development to Lay the Foundations for Economic Opportunity and Wellbeing

Researchers:
Location:
Connecticut
Type:
  • Full project
A key mechanism for the perpetuation of poverty across generations is the accumulated developmental deficits of children from deprived backgrounds, who often lack a nurturing and stimulating environment. Moreover, poverty is associated with an incidence of...

2019

A Pilot Study to Increase Take-up of Overdose Reversal Drugs

Researchers:
  • Mireille Jacobson
  • David Powell
Location:
United States
Type:
  • Pilot project
Despite widespread public attention to the opioid epidemic and numerous policies to prevent opioid misuse, overdose deaths in the United States increased 16 percent per annum between 2014 and 2017. Public health authorities consider naloxone, a prescription...

Deferring Agency at End-of-Life: The Role of Information and Advance Directives

Researchers:
  • Ben Handel
  • Nianyi Hong
  • Allyson Barnett Root
  • Michelle Yip
Location:
Oregon and Washington
Type:
  • Pilot project
Researchers will pilot a randomized evaluation of strategies to facilitate advance directive completion in the over-65 patient population of Providence St. Joseph Health. Despite the significant economic and personal implications of end-of-life health care...

Why Does Diversity Matter for Health?

Researchers:
Location:
United States
Type:
  • Pilot project
Prior research has found that patient-doctor racial concordance is important for increasing the demand for preventive healthcare among low-income African American men, particularly for invasive services. Although results were consistent with better...

2018

Fresh Food Farmacy: A Randomized Controlled Trial

Researchers:
Location:
Pennsylvania
We propose a pragmatic, prospective, randomized-controlled trial of Geisinger’s Fresh Food Farmacy (FFF) program. FFF brings a “food-as-medicine” approach to treat food-insecure diabetics featuring a diet prescription filled at an FFF clinic each week—enough...

2017

The Impact of Medicare Bundled Payments: Evidence from a Nationwide Randomized Evaluation for Lower Extremity Joint Replacement

Researchers:
Location:
United States
Type:
  • Full project
Bundled payments are a key part of Medicare’s shift away from the traditional fee-for-service (FFS) payment model. We propose to study a nationwide randomized-controlled trial (RCT) of bundled payments for knee and hip replacements that was designed by CMS and...

The Burden of Medical Debt and the Impact of Debt Forgiveness

Researchers:
  • Raymond Kluender
  • Neale Mahoney
  • Francis Wong
Location:
United States
Type:
  • Full project
Medical debt is potentially a large burden for many Americans—with 44 million individuals holding an aggregate $75 billion in medical debt. While these nominal amounts are staggering, it is unclear to what extent medical debt harms financial well-being...

2016

Do Informed Physicians Make Better Referrals?

Researchers:
  • Michael Chernew
  • Zack Cooper
  • Fiona Scott Morton
Location:
United States
Type:
  • Pilot project
Health care providers’ prices vary substantially within geographies and there is little evidence that higher priced providers deliver higher quality care. With more than 43% of total health care spending estimated to be ‘shoppable’, the savings from improving...

2015

Nutritional Supports for At‐Risk Patients

Researchers:
Location:
Massachusetts
Type:
  • Pilot project
Cardiovascular diseases are by far the leading causes of death in the United States, with over 800,000 deaths annually. Approximately 1 in 4 Americans with cardiometabolic conditions such as hypertension, hyperlipidemia, and diabetes experience food insecurity...

Commit to Quit: Commitment Contracts for Smoking Cessation

Researchers:
  • Daren Anderson
  • Samantha Horn
  • Amanda Kowalski
  • Jody Sindelar
Location:
United States
Type:
  • Full project
This study will examine how advance commitment to a commitment contract impacts smoking cessation rates, by affecting the likelihood of taking up a commitment contract. By shifting the decision to start a commitment contract into an earlier time period, the...

Overcoming Financial Barriers to Caring for Preterm Infants

Researchers:
Location:
Massachusetts
Type:
  • Pilot project
This pilot randomized controlled trial, conducted in collaboration with Tufts Medical Center, aims to determine whether financial support can increase caregivers’ ability to breastfeed and provide skin-to-skin care to preterm infants. The study team's central...

2014

Health Care Hotspotting: A Randomized Controlled Trial

Researchers:
Location:
Camden, New Jersey
Type:
  • Full project
  • Pilot project
The Camden Coalition of Healthcare Providers’ Care Management Program, Link2Care, targets “super-utilizers” of the health care system – specifically adults with two or more hospitalizations in the prior six months and multiple chronic conditions – with...

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