Faced with shrinking budgets and growing needs, state and local governments and community organizations across the United States are trying to do more with less. The recent economic downturn has made it harder to address basic needs — such as improving access to services in urban and rural areas, updating an aging infrastructure, preparing students for 21st century jobs, protecting the environment, and ensuring the overall health and well-being of their residents.
Confronting the stark choices imposed by this environment, decisionmakers are asking tough questions:
Beginning with its work in New York City in the early 1970s, RAND has partnered actively with communities across the U.S. seeking to come to grips with longstanding problems and new challenges posed by sudden change. For decades, RAND has used its analytic expertise to help states and localities diagnose policy problems, identify solutions, and implement solutions.
Analyzes existing demographic, health status, and hospital service use data for the District of Columbia, as well as current stakeholder perspectives, health policy, and investment priorities.
Stakeholders in communities in which health care access was disrupted by Hurricane Katrina were engaged in an assessment of health priorities, as well as in data interpretation and plan design, to produce a sustainable community-academic partnership.
Assesses the health care needs of the residents of Prince George's County, Maryland, and the capacity of the county's health care system to meet those needs.
Examines whether inclusionary zoning programs in the United States serve lower-income families and provide recipients with access to low-poverty neighborhoods and high-performing schools.
Research on the cost of crime and the effectiveness of police in preventing crime can be used to better understand the returns on investments in police. Returns on investments in police personnel are likely to be substantial.
The Affordable Care Act (ACA) will increase coverage through the expansion of Medicaid and the creation of a Health Insurance Exchange with subsidies. RAND researchers analyzed the ACA’s economic impact on the state of Arkansas.
The study identifies some of the greatest socioeconomic, health, safety, and school readiness disparities for boys and men of color in California and reviews strategies to reduce the disparities, including effective programs, practices, and policies.
The Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority of Louisiana used a new analytic approach, developed in part by RAND, that incorporates results from predictive models in a decision tool to allow formulation and comparison of alternatives.
The Helping Families Raise Healthy Children initiative addressed depression among parents of children with early childhood developmental delays, aligning the early intervention and behavioral health systems with a focus on relationship-based care.
Identifies five strategies for incorporating child assessments into the design, implementation, and evaluation of initiatives designed to raise the quality of care in early care and education settings such as quality rating and improvement systems.
Describes a web-based mapping tool to help healthcare decisionmakers identify neighborhood-level ''hotspots'' of suboptimal health or healthcare that may be due to low health literacy.
Performance-based accountability systems (PBASs) link incentives to measured performance to improve services to the public. This book discusses PBASs' effectiveness in child care, education, health care, emergency preparedness, and transportation.
Charter schools do not generally draw the top students from other public schools. Their test-score gains are similar to those of traditional public schools, but they have higher rates of students graduating high school and attending college.
New York's Schoolwide Performance Bonus Program, whose broad objective was to improve student performance through school-based financial incentives, did not in fact do so, perhaps because it did not motivate change in educator behavior.
Summarizes results of RAND's evaluation of the progress and impact of Arkansas' antismoking and health programs established with its share of tobacco settlement funds.
Overviews the study Enhancing Quality Interventions Promoting Healthy Sexuality (EQUIPS), which tests how well a community-based setting conducts an EBP, Making Proud Choices, that aims to prevent teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections.
Provides a roadmap for federal, state, and local leaders who are developing plans to enhance community resilience for health security threats and describes options for building community resilience in key areas.
A toolkit intended to help state and local health departments of all sizes incorporate quality improvement methods and promising strategies in six key domains into their current emergency preparedness activities.
