Designing culturally-sensitive personalized interventions is essential to sustain patients’ involvement in their treatment, and encourage patients to take an active role in their own health and health care. We consider patient activation and empowerment as a cyclical process defined through patient accumulation of knowledge, confidence, and self-determination for their own health and health care. We propose a patient-centered, multi-level activation and empowerment framework (individual-, health care professional-, community-, and health care delivery system-level) to inform the development of culturally informed personalized patient activation and empowerment (P-PAE) interventions to improve population health, and reduce racial and ethnic disparities. We discuss relevant Affordable Care Act payment and delivery policy reforms, and how they impact patient activation and empowerment. Such policies include Accountable Care Organizations and Value Based Purchasing, Patient Centered Medical Homes, and the Community Health Benefit. Challenges and possible solutions to implementing the P-PAE are discussed. Comprehensive and longitudinal data sets with consistent P-PAE measures are needed to conduct comparative effectiveness analyses to evaluate the optimal P-PAE model. We believe the P-PAE model is timely and sustainable, and will be critical to engaging patients in their treatment, developing patients’ abilities to manage their health, helping patients to express concerns and preferences regarding treatment, empowering patients to ask questions about treatment options, and building up strategic patient-provider partnerships through shared decision making.

Background: Past research shows that among individuals with substance use disorders, the presence of a co-occurring mental illness can influence the initiation, course, and success of behavioral health treatment, but little research has examined people with opioid use disorder (OUD) specifically.Methods: Using the 2008 -2014 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, this study examines the utilization of substance use disorder and mental health treatment among individuals with OUD and different degrees of mental illness severity. The study also examined types of treatment, perceived unmet need for treatment, and barriers to care.Results: 47 percent of individuals with OUD and co-occurring mild/moderate mental illness did not receive any behavioral health treatment, and 21 percent of those with co-occurring serious mental illnesses did not receive any behavioral health treatment. Among those with OUD and cooccurring mild/moderate mental illness, 16 percent reported receiving both substance use disorder and mental health treatment; among those with co-occurring serious mental illness the rate was 32 percent. The most common form of treatment was prescription medication for mental health, and this was true regardless of whether or not the individual had any mental illness. More than 50 percent of the study population reported financial difficulties as a barrier to treatment.

State policies pertaining to prenatal substance use have important implications for health outcomes of pregnant women and their infants. However, little is known about the impact of the various types of state-level prenatal substance use policies (i.e., treatment and supportive services; criminal justice initiatives; and health care provider reporting requirements) on substance use disorder treatment admissions. Using data from the 2002-2014 Treatment Episode Data Set-Admissions, we exploited state-level variation in the implementation of different types of policies to assess their impact on pregnant women's admission to substance use disorder treatment. The study found that statelevel prenatal substance use policies focused only on the criminal justice sector were negatively associated with the proportion of women of reproductive age who were pregnant upon admission to treatment. Additionally, the implementation of policies that engaged all three sectors was positively associated with the proportion of women of reproductive age who were pregnant upon admission to treatment. These results were consistent across age groups and for both non-Hispanic white women and women of other racial/ethnic groups. The findings imply that states with cross-sector policy engagement around prenatal substance use and policies that take a multifaceted, comprehensive approach are more likely to see an increase in admissions to substance use disorder treatment during pregnancy.

Our results suggest that LHDs in Maryland that engage in mental health prevention, promotion, and coordination activities are associated with benefits for residents and for the health care system at large. Additional research is needed to evaluate LHD activities in other states to determine if these results are generalizable.

Improving care coordination and integration are essential to meeting the growing demands for healthcare access, while controlling costs and improving quality of service delivery. These results suggest that it will be effective to engage local health departments in the integrated behavioral health system.