Conceptualizing Performance Measurement for Social Care Interventions: An Issue Brief for State Medicaid Agencies

This issue brief explores opportunities for state Medicaid agencies to implement performance measures with contracted entities that could strengthen their growing interest in social care and highlights several barriers to those applications.

The growing recognition that socioeconomic adversity impacts health outcomes have led the healthcare sector to support initiatives that address social determinants of health. There is an opportunity to leverage performance measures to further incentivize these interventions and track adoption. Several social care use cases are relevant to Medicaid agencies, including:

• Monitoring managed care organizations’ compliance with specific state or federal initiatives/requirements;
• Advancing practice adoption by applying financial incentives, withholds, or public “scorecard” reporting; and
• Informing future program development.