With funding assistance from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the National Governors Association recently announced three new health policy initiatives today to assist states in modernizing state data systems, improving the health of children and families and strengthening Medicaid evaluation.
• NGA’s Harnessing the Power of Data to Achieve State Policy Goals: The Foundation for State Success in Improving Quality and Reducing Costs initiative will highlight data best practices in health policymaking. Eight states were selected for this 16-month project: Arkansas, Colorado, Delaware, Indiana, Iowa, Minnesota, Vermont and Washington. Participants will address governance, cross-sector data sharing, and systems capabilities to enhance data-informed policy and capacity building across state agencies.
• NGA’s Fostering Cross-Sector Collaboration to Address the Health and Success of Children and Families initiative focuses on cross-sector collaboration to improve the health and success of children and families. Alaska, Hawaii, Kansas, Minnesota, and Rhode Island were selected to participate in a 14-month project in which they will build collaboration across multiple state agencies to support local partners in addressing educational, social, economic and environmental issues affecting the health and success of children and their families.
• NGA’s Building State Capacity to Evaluate Innovative Medicaid Policies is a year-long project that will assist four states — Alaska, Colorado, Illinois and New Hampshire — in developing data-driven evaluations of their new Medicaid policies. Each state will work toward an evaluation strategy that will be tailored to the specific policies they are pursuing under their Medicaid waivers, ranging from Medicaid community engagement requirements to hospital value-based purchasing and expanding treatment for opioid and other substance use disorders.
