Our Work
President Donald Trump today declared opioid abuse a nationwide public health emergency and said his administration will take aggressive steps to address the epidemic’s causes and effects.
“It is time to liberate our communities from this scourge of drug addiction,” he said in a speech at the White House. “I am directing all executive agencies to use every appropriate emergency authority to fight the opioid crisis.”
I found my job at the Colorado Health Institute by typing “health policy Colorado” into Google.
CHI was the first search result. And in August 2013 it was looking for a research assistant.
The job description fit my skill set, and CHI seemed like the type of organization I wanted to work for. Most importantly, I had the same positive gut reaction that brought me from Boston to Denver after visiting my best friend at the University of Denver months earlier.
It’s been nearly four years since that lucky Google search.
Colorado’s Medicaid program — called Health First Colorado — provides health coverage for upwards of one fourth of Colorado’s population. And it’s about to undergo some major changes.
The evolution of the ACC. Since 2011, Colorado has been grappling with a seemingly paradoxical question: How do you improve the health of Medicaid members while reducing costs? Colorado’s response is called the Accountable Care Collaborative (ACC).
More than half a million Coloradans live in a county with few or no treatment options for people suffering from opioid addiction.
The nation is in the midst of an epidemic of opioid addiction and overdose deaths, and Colorado is no exception. Medication-assisted treatment, or MAT, is a proven way to fight this epidemic. It’s an evidence-based approach recommended by a wide range of respected scientific sources for the treatment of addiction to opioids, a category of drug that derives from the opium poppy and includes prescription pain pills as well as heroin.
Behavioral health is a hot topic in Colorado these days – and for good reason.
Suicide rates have reached an all-time high. The rate of opioid overdoses continues to climb. And in 2015, nine percent of Coloradans – or 440,000 residents – said they needed mental health care or counseling but did not get it, according to the Colorado Health Access Survey (CHAS).
In his State of the State address on Jan. 12, Gov. John Hickenlooper called for making the behavioral health system “easier to navigate, more efficient and more responsive.”
He noted strides in expanding access to coverage and integrating primary care and behavioral health. “But,” he added, “behavioral health demands our attention at all points … and not just as one-off efforts when problems get too big to ignore.”
Colorado consistently ranks well nationally on health-related measures such as obesity and physical activity. But Colorado also is in the top 10 of a list no state wants to win — the highest rate of suicides.
Third in a three-part blog series on the impact of mental health policy changes in Colorado following the Aurora theater mass shootings four years ago.
The policy approaches in Connecticut after the Sandy Hook school shootings - five months after Colorado's Aurora theater shootings - can provide guidance to Colorado and other states that are working to provide better access to mental health intervention services.
Second in a three-part blog series on the impact of mental health policy changes in Colorado following the Aurora theater mass shooting four years ago.
In the four years since the deadly Aurora Theater shootings, many of the resulting policies addressing mental health care and crisis services in Colorado have started to show promise. Others, though, are designed to fix long-term systemic issues and will take much longer to implement and then assess.
Adolescence is a time of great change, many unknowns and great opportunity. And for some, it’s a critical time to get the help they need.