Psychiatry Online published an article entitled “Cervical Cancer Screening and Acute Care Visits Among Medicaid Enrollees With Mental and Substance Use Disorders” on June 1, which counted among its co-authors Michael T. Abrams and Cynthia Boddie-Willis, a Senior Research Analyst and Director of Health Services Policy and Research for The Hilltop Institute, respectively.

The piece, which involved creating logistic models using data from women enrolled in Medicaid for 2005, used cancer screening and acute care visits as dependent variables and mental illness flags and independent variables in order to “compare rates of cervical cancer screening and acute care (primary or gynecological) visits among women with and without a diagnosis of psychosis, substance use disorder, bipolar disorder or
mania, or depression,” according to the study.

Ultimately, the authors concluded that women with serious mental disorders who utilize Medicaid in Maryland were more likely to receive cervical cancer screening along with other related acute care visits than the control group, in contast to women with only substance use disorders, who were more at risk to not receive cancer screenings as opposed to acute care visits. As such, the authors of the piece recommended that “acute care visits [were] a high-potential path toward better prevention” of cervical cancer among these patients at risk.

The a PDF of the original article can be found here.