Human Services Research Institute Inc

Programs: Behavioral health:one of the focuses of hsri's work is behavioral health. The behavioral health team within hsri is comprised of staff that have worked on projects that address a wide variety of issues related to the prevention and treatment of substance abuse and mental illness and that provide sustainable ways to improve services that lead to recovery and advance the quality of life for persons with substance use disorders and serious mental illness. The behavioral health team has worked with federal, state, county, providers and foundation partners over the years in a wide range of projects that have focused on needs assessment and systems planning, gap analysis, policy planning and analysis, technical assistance and training, quality and performance indicators, program evaluation and data analysis. The behavioral health staff has: conducted needs assessment to identify service needs at the national, state and local levels; identified, implemented and evaluated evidence-based practices and promising practices in the areas of housing, employment, case management, integrated services, peer-operated services, etc. ; evaluated the cultural competency of services; developed computerized budget simulation and resource allocation models for projecting the costs and potential cost offsets of implementing jail or prison diversion programs for offenders with mental illness; and have conducted synthetic estimations and other techniques to assist states and counties prepare for health care reform. The behavioral health team also works with health data in building data warehouses and working with states on using this data to track utilization, cost and monitoring quality. Funding for projects of the behavioral health team has come from three centers of the substance abuse and mental health services administration (center for mental health services, center for substance abuse prevention, and centers for substance abuse treatment), center for medicare and medicaid services ("cms"), foundations, states, counties and local providers.

intellectual and developmental disabilities:hsri has been involved in the field of developmental disabilities since the organization's inception in 1976. The institute's work has tracked the important and historic changes that have taken place during that time including the movement of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities out of public institutions, the use of medicaid waiver funds to leverage that transition, the creation of community supports, the growth of the family support movement, the expansion of quality assurance and improvement systems, support for the expanding self-advocacy movement, and the press for self-determination. Hsri has strong collaborations with nationally recognized organizations including our partnership with the national association of directors of developmental disabilities to support the national core indicators an outcome measurement system that spans more than 40 states. The institute also partners with academic institutions including that institute on community inclusion at the university of massachusetts as well as the research and training center on community integration at the university of minnesota. Finally, hsri works with a number of state id/dd agencies around the country to assist in developing resource allocation strategies that more closely align with the functional needs of individuals receiving waiver and other medicaid services.

population health:hsri works closely with a variety of federal, state and private entities to design, implement, and evaluate health data systems with the goal of providing high-quality data for both system management and research functions. This includes working with stakeholders to improve data quality, ensuring that systems make use of best practices and relevant data standards, creating and maintaining custom data warehouses that properly secure sensitive health data, and producing analytic and data products that provide value to researchers, evaluators, policy makers, program managers, advocacy organizations, and the public. Hsri prides itself on creating health data systems that are responsive to the needs of all stakeholders: funders, data submitters, data users, and the general public. Based on this principle, our health data systems are designed so provider organizations and states can manage their information assets; to facilitate retrieval of relevant information quickly and efficiently; to insure the reliability of data submitted; to meet the needs of multiple data users related to program oversight, cost monitoring, quality assurance and program evaluation; and to quickly provide those data back to stakeholders in a user-friendly fashion.

child and family services:the child and family services ("cfs") team at hsri provides program evaluation, consultation, training and technical assistance to child-serving agencies with the ultimate goal of promoting best practices among such agencies. We work closely with representatives from all levels of the public sector (federal, state, and local officials) to design, implement, and report the findings for each of our individual projects. While many of our projects examine child welfare service systems, we also have significant experience in other human service areas which intersect with this population; in particular, we have worked closely with agencies to help understand services available to children and families with developmental disabilities, mental health, and substance abuse issues. Whatever our audience may be, we use the same basic approach of strong communication and collaboration to ensure that our work is grounded in the reality of the current service environment as experienced by children and families.