October 23, 2023 – Viaduct Consulting LLC, led by HARP Executive Director Vikki Wachino, released a first-of-its-kind report, “Recommendations for Medicaid Coverage of Opioid Use Disorder Services in Jails and Prisons,” which recommends ways to advance quality, evidence-based services for opioid use disorder in state prisons and local jails by allowing Medicaid to cover those services. This report is the first to recommend specific services and standards that Medicaid could cover in a prison or jail setting and comes as groundbreaking new Medicaid policies to cover some services provided in prisons and jails are taking place. For additional information, see recent blogs about the report from The Pew Charitable Trust and The Milbank Memorial Fund. To learn more about the Health and Reentry Project (HARP), visit https://healthandreentryproject.org/learn-more/.
The report, “Recommendations for Medicaid Coverage of Opioid Use Disorder Services In Jails and Prisons,” is the first in a three-part series that recommends ways to advance quality, evidence based OUD services in state prisons and local jails by allowing Medicaid to cover those services. The two subsequent reports containing recommended performance measures and payment strategies to advance provision of Medicaid-covered OUD services in prisons and jails will be issued later this year.
These three reports are authored by consultants Daniel Teixiera da Silva and John O’Brien; Vikki Wachino, Executive Director and Founder of the Health and Reentry Project; and Greg Williams, Ashley DeGarmo, and Bamidele Odusote of Third Horizon Strategies.