An official website of the United States government
September 30, 2019
Service Delivery Improvement Fiscal Year 2019 Research Grant Awards
Data Trends and Analysis
These research grants examine ways to improve the patient experience of care (including quality and satisfaction) to optimize health system performance.
Child Trends, Inc.
Annual Funding: $300,000
Project Overview: Child Trends, Inc. will implement a set of research projects with the broad goal of helping Title X family planning providers better meet the healthcare needs of their clients, especially hard-to-reach populations. These include documenting changes in populations served by providers, as well as provider approaches to ensuring the provision of fertility awareness-based methods; how providers assess client satisfaction to ensure their services and outreach are accessible to the varied populations they serve; innovative service delivery approaches to reach diverse populations; and how providers staff their clinics to provide a broad range of services to increasingly diverse populations.
Oregon Health and Science University
Annual Funding: $130,000
Project Overview: This research will identify how multilevel factors influence access, quality, utilization, and discontinuation and drive differences in effective contraception use and, ultimately, unintended pregnancy.
Innovations in Family Planning Clinical Service Delivery
The goal of these research awards is to identify innovative family planning clinical service delivery models that could be used to provide quality family planning services outside of the traditional clinic setting.
Child Trends, Inc.
Annual Funding: $690,000
Project Overview: High schools (in particular, school-based health centers) and community colleges are promising entry points for Title X providers to offer family planning services to hard-to-reach populations. Linking Title X services to school-based populations has the potential to address many unmet family planning needs. This project will conduct a study to identify, evaluate, and disseminate practitioner-friendly toolkits about innovative Title X family planning clinical service delivery models that can be used in school-based health centers and community college settings serving hard-to-reach populations or providing services in resource-limited areas.
The Regents of the University of California, San Francisco
Annual Funding: $500,000
Project Overview: Community health centers (CHCs) are not able to use currently available contraceptive care performance measures endorsed by the National Quality Forum (NQF) because they use a prospective payment system that pays a consistent fee per visit, in accordance with Medicaid policy, rather than using claims. This project will advance the development and dissemination of performance measures specific to family planning patient-reported outcome performance measure (PRO-PM) for patient-centered contraceptive counseling by testing the validity and reliability of electronic clinical quality measures (eCQMs) that use data from electronic health records (EHR) to measure performance for CHCs.
University of Northern Colorado
Annual Funding: $499,385
Project Overview: This project will expand the knowledge base regarding cessation strategies that adolescents and young adults use to maintain their reproductive health by examining how family planning services can incorporate technology and cessation counseling strategies in primary medical clinics and other clinic workflows, including Title X clinics.
Studies to Address Opportunities and Barriers for Linking Family Planning Services and Substance Use Disorder Screening and Treatment
These research awards focus on filling a critical gap in knowledge regarding family planning service provision, that is, how to increase access to family planning services for women and men who misuse opioids and/or other substances, including those with substance use disorders (SUDs).
AccessMatters
Annual Funding: $725,000
Project Overview: This project proposes to make family planning care accessible and practical for low-income people with substance use disorders (SUDs), by addressing their barriers to care through Patient Navigation at SUDs treatment centers. The intervention to be studied addresses two disparities in family planning: disproportionately low access to and utilization of family planning services among people with SUDs and the high incidence of unplanned pregnancy, STIs, births with neonatal abstinence syndrome (NAS), and other adverse sexual health outcomes among people with SUDs. Patient Navigation is a model of care coordination that offesr support, guidance, resources, and direct care linkages to people who face significant barriers to accessing timely, quality care.
Altarum Institute
Annual Funding: $600,000
Project Overview: Providing contraceptive counseling and person-centered family planning services as part of substance use treatment and providing substance use treatment as part of routine family planning care can reduce unintended pregnancies and improve reproductive health for women and men with substance use disorders (SUDs) as well as reduce the incidence of neonatal abstinence syndrome (NAS) and improve infant and childhood health outcomes. This project will develop and pilot a new model of collaboration between family planning and behavioral health services to improve collaboration among providers and coordination of services.
Denver Health and Hospital Authority
Annual Funding: $475,000
Project Overview: The primary goal of this project is to identify an innovative delivery model to address the family planning needs of individuals of reproductive age (18-44) in treatment for opioid use disorder at an urban integrated safety-net health system. This study will adapt an existing linkage navigator intervention to be inclusive of all patients of reproductive age receiving treatment for opioid use disorder regardless of pregnancy desire; and assess the acceptability, feasibility and impact of the intervention.
Public Health Solutions
Annual Funding: $530,000
Project Overview: Women of reproductive age with substance use disorders (SUDs) report significant barriers to accessing family planning services and, for existing family planning clients, untreated SUDs impact use of effective contraception and can result in adverse maternal and infant health outcomes. This project will conduct a clinical pilot study of an intervention designed to increase the linkage between family planning services and SUDs treatment for women of reproductive age with opioid use disorder and other SUDs in order to better meet their family planning and SUDs needs and to reduce unintended pregnancies and increase healthy pregnancies among this population.