Hoover Fellow Secures $786,100 Grant to Study Ways to Reduce Rates of Involuntary Mental Health Hospitalization

Hoover Institution (Stanford, CA) - A research team led by Hoover Kleinheinz Fellow Valentin Bolotnyy has just secured a Stanford Impact Labs grant worth $786,100 to discover ways to reduce rates of involuntary mental health hospitalization.

Specifically, Bolotnyy and his team's study will assess whether financial incentives to people suffering from mental illness encourages them to maintain medication schedules and outpatient care services and, in turn, improves patient outcomes in the long run.

The research team includes Natalia Emanuel, research economist at the New York Federal Reserve; Alex Jutca, director of the Office of Analytics Technology and Planning at the Allegheny County Department of Human Services; and Pim Welle, chief data scientist at Allegheny County Department of Human Services.

In Allegheny County and elsewhere in the United States, people suffering from mental health crises are in many cases hospitalized involuntarily. These people have a higher risk of interacting with law enforcement, experiencing future hospitalizations, or dying in the years after an involuntary hospitalization.

At the same time, recently discharged mental health patients demonstrate a low adherence to outpatient care prescribed to them after release. In Allegheny County, 60 percent of Medicaid enrollees discharged from an involuntary hospitalization do not attend the outpatient care prescribed to them in the following ninety days.

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