The “opioid crisis” is a complex phenomenon that continues to evolve in multiple dimensions. Atlas Research is working with government agencies, private sector health care providers, and community-based organizations to understand and address the challenges associated with opioid abuse, misuse, and overdose, because only a multi-sector approach can reverse today’s disturbing trends.

That’s one of the lessons from a comprehensive environmental scan that Atlas conducted with the SAFE Project, a national nonprofit intent on ending the opioid epidemic. The scan looked at a wide range of non-governmental efforts, from public awareness and family outreach to law enforcement and medical responses. The Atlas team identified clear gaps in national efforts, such as a lack of education about alternative, non-addictive pain management strategies. The SAFE project raised awareness of other organizations that also take a multi-faceted approach to the epidemic, laying the ground for collaboration and sharing of promising practices.

Opioids initially became widely available because they worked so well for reducing patients’ pain after surgery. Atlas, in partnership with Premier, Inc., helped engage stakeholders in an educational program supported by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). The program informs hospitals, doctors, patients, and families about reducing harm from post-operative opioid pain management.

The National Partnership to End Health Disparities (NPA), established by the Office of Minority Health (OMH), recognizes that the opioid epidemic is a threat to communities of color. Atlas is helping OMH’s NPA Opioid Caucus build an operational infrastructure and outline goals, objectives, and activities to guide its efforts. Atlas is also helping regional organizations collaborate more effectively with federal programs and elevate promising practices to national attention.

The U.S. got a shocking wake-up call in 2018. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported that suicide has become a top-ten cause of death – and the rate is increasing in almost every state in the union. Before the year was over, Atlas was on the front lines of a national effort to prevent suicide among one of the country’s most at-risk populations: Veterans.

The suicide rate for U.S. Veterans is 22% higher than for adult civilians. The youngest Veterans (aged 18 to 29) have the highest rates of suicide, and female Veterans take their own lives at a rate 2.5 times higher than their civilian counterparts. These disturbing statistics drove the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs (VA) to make suicide prevention its highest priority.

With its deep expertise and demonstrated agility in tackling major public health challenges, Atlas is involved in all three phases: research, strategy, and implementation.

Atlas supported VA’s Health Services Research & Development (HSRD) organization with an analysis of peer-reviewed research on Veteran suicide to help frame strategic discussions. At the same time, Atlas experts swung into action with VA’s Office of Mental Health and Suicide Prevention, providing research, analysis, and policy plan development support to improve VA’s suicide prevention programs and policies. Atlas is also helping disseminate innovative, promising practices for suicide prevention to an extended network of care facilities, through the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) Innovation Network.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) administers the two largest health care programs in the U.S. Atlas, as a member of The MITRE Corporation’s Health FFRDC Alliance, is assisting CMS in finding the right path forward with major initiatives that are certain to have nationwide impact.

Rural Health

One of the sharpest disparities in U.S. health care is between urban areas, with their abundance of health care providers and large pool of patients, and less populous rural areas; which struggle to deliver the services patients need. Acting CMS Administrator Andy Slavitt established the Rural Health Council in 2016 to identify ways to address this disparity.

With its deep knowledge of rural health, underserved populations, and Federally Qualified Healthcare Centers, Atlas provided the Council with strategic planning and coordination. Currently, Atlas is supporting stakeholder engagement and partnerships, and rural health evaluation and analysis, particularly around rural maternal health.

Improving treatment for a given disease condition starts with gaining precision. Which types of people does it affect, which health markers reveal it, and which environments and lifestyles influence it? Achieving that precision typically takes decades of research.

Now the National Institutes of Health (NIH) aim to accelerate progress by amassing a research cohort of more than a million adults and making their biomedical, environmental, and lifestyle data available to medical researchers. Atlas is on the team.

This innovative program has a deceptively simple name: “All of Us.” The million-strong cohort must represent the full diversity of the nation in order to support meaningful, sustainable medical advances. Atlas is working to ensure that diversity, in partnership with the Federally Funded Research and Development Center (FFRDC) managed by MITRE Corp.

MITRE Corp. and Atlas are focusing on six Federally Qualified Health Centers around the country that have historically provided health care to underserved populations. These centers have agreed to enroll patients in All of Us and then collect and deliver data to NIH – but they need efficient, secure, highly reliable processes to follow through. With its expertise in health care, underserved populations and lean principles, the Atlas Team is empowering the centers to play their part in a historic effort to improve health care for all.

After Congress passed the most significant statutory change to affect VA appeals in decades — the Veterans’ Appeals Improvement and Modernization Act of 2017 (AMA) — the Board of Veterans’ Appeals secured Atlas’ support to design and execute a change management strategy for implementation of the new law. Board leadership recognized that helping employees understand, embrace, and adopt AMA would be just as critical as the Act’s new policies, procedures, and technological updates.

Atlas began working with the Board nine months before AMA implementation, designing and deploying a recurring survey aimed at measuring the Board’s readiness to adopt the changes outlined under the new law. Survey analysis provided insight into four key areas: understanding the need for change, management and leadership support, communication effectiveness, and role and skill preparedness. Atlas developed targeted recommendations and strategies to address each of these four areas, resulting in improved change readiness scores across all four categories.

One of Atlas’ key recommendations was to brand the Board, providing it with an identity that highlights the Chairman’s priority of leading the organization toward the future as an innovative, integrated team dedicated to serving Veterans through AMA. The Board’s new identity and tagline — Board 2.0: Every Decision Matters — sends a clear message to Veterans, Congress, and employees that the Board is dedicated to improving the appeals process to positively impact tens of thousands of Veterans every year.

A growing number of U.S. Veterans who are aging or have complex health care needs want to be cared for in the comfort of their own homes. That’s why the Veterans Experience Office (VEO) of the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) launched its “Choose Home” initiative – and chose Atlas Research to spearhead an innovative approach.

In 2018, Atlas supported VEO in developing an integrated, comprehensive model of home care for the Veterans Health Administration (VHA). The model is based on essential intelligence that Atlas experts gathered from Veterans, family caregivers, community leaders, and VA providers and employees. A group of VHA facilities around the country is now testing the model; identifying Veterans at risk for institutional care, determining their needs, and empowering VHA facilities and external caregivers to coordinate and deliver a customized suite of services. VEO aims for a national rollout of the model in 2020.

Atlas is uniquely positioned to engage many players in this combined effort, based on years of experience with implementing innovative care delivery models and programs for Veterans and their caregivers. Most importantly, Atlas knows how to develop and execute a strategy that will give Veterans the experience they want; receiving care in their homes and communities from people and organizations they trust.

When the U.S. Congress passed the “Every Student Succeeds Act,” it gave the states both an opportunity and a challenge. The 2015 law set up a $250 million grant program to support early childhood education (ECE) for at-risk children from birth through five years, in all 56 U.S. states and territories. The premise of the program, known as PDG B-5, is simple: kids who arrive at kindergarten behind their peers in educational attainment will struggle to catch up – for years or forever.

But PDG B-5 came with a requirement to spend grant funds collaboratively, in ways that build on existing local, state and federal ECE programs such as Head Start. As a result, the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) within the Department of Health and Human Services (HSS) structured the first year of this four-year award cycle with a focus on completing comprehensive needs assessments and strategic planning.

Atlas, in partnership with MITRE Corp., is now helping states and territories that won PDG B-5 grants to succeed with their first-year efforts, so they can serve children ages birth to five more effectively with direct funding for ECE programs in the following three years. Atlas experts are providing grantees with technical assistance for gathering key information, assessing strengths and weaknesses, sharing best practices with other grantees, and more.

What if adjudicators processing service-connected disability claims at the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) could feel more connected to the Veterans they serve? This is just one of the many outcomes Atlas is working to create in partnership with Amida and VA to modernize disability claim processing by looking for opportunities to increase processing speed, consistency, and transparency with Veterans.

Currently, Veterans with service-connected disabilities are compensated based on their disability according to the VA Schedule for Rating of Disabilities (VASRD). Adjudicators on Veteran disability medical records consult VASRD and determine the compensation for the Veteran’s claim. The existing process arose before modern information technology systems and many aspects involve non-computable data (data not in a form that is easily worked with by other information systems). As a result, Veterans commonly wait weeks and months to learn if or how they will be compensated for their disability.

Atlas is employing human-centered design (HCD) to architect a new approach that automates simple claims, allowing adjudicators to spend their time serving Veterans with more complex claims. This innovative approach simplifies the claim-filing process for Veterans and reduces the time from submission to compensation, while also providing the adjudicator with focused evidentiary materials, which cuts the amount of material the adjudicator must review and speeds the time to award the Veteran’s claim.

For example, Veterans who spend 21 days or more in a hospital for their disability qualify for additional compensation. In the new design, this compensation change will happen automatically; without requiring approval from an adjudicator. Furthermore, Atlas is working to expand this capability toward a future where compensation for service-connected disabilities starts on the first day military members leave active service, not months later after discharge and multiple additional medical exams and claim submissions. The next big step is supporting VA adjudicators by improving the tools they use to manage their work queue, find relevant data, and visualize claim evidence data to make rapid and confident decisions.

Reforming the federal government inevitably means changing the way employees do their work — even for successful agencies such as the Small Business Administration (SBA) with its small staff and impressive record of service to millions of entrepreneurs. When the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) issued Memorandum 17-22 in 2017, calling on all agencies to “develop a plan to maximize employee performance,” SBA turned to Atlas for an expert perspective on its workforce, its reform plan, and opportunities to become even more efficient.

The result is a multi-year Human Capital and Training Services (HCaTS) contract from SBA’s Office of Human Resource Solutions (OHRS) – a first for Atlas’ fast-growing human capital business.

SBA’s mission depends on specialists across a wide range of disciplines — lending, contracting, legal, and business advisory services among others. As a result, in 2018 Atlas experts focused on identifying SBA’s mission-critical occupations, defining the required competencies for each one, and determining the underlying root causes for retention and recruitment challenges in those key positions.

With its integrated expertise in human capital, change management and organizational transformation, Atlas developed this essential intelligence quickly to support SBA’s reform plan. Atlas is now helping the agency implement the plan, while providing both insights and strategies for keeping and hiring the right people to ensure the agency’s continued success.

It’s hard to find an adult who doesn’t know that HIV is a dangerous virus. It’s surprisingly easy to find health clinics that don’t yet offer one of the best defenses; a medication known as pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), which keeps people who are HIV negative from becoming infected. Atlas Research has previously helped public health authorities understand the reasons for this slow adoption, and in 2018 Atlas began working to reverse the trend.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report that women make up roughly 20% of new HIV diagnoses in the U.S., yet they are not receiving a proportional share of PrEP prescriptions. Title X-funded family planning clinics already offer frontline care to 3.6 million women across the country, so the Office of Population Affairs (OPA) within the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) commissioned Atlas to develop, pilot, and disseminate a strategy for speeding the clinics’ adoption of PrEP.

Atlas first created a decision-making guide that provides a clear rationale and roadmap for offering PrEP in family planning settings and then tested it with nine diverse Title X clinics around the country. After using the decision-making guide, all nine clinics either offered PrEP or were on their way. A national rollout of the decision-making guide is now underway for more than 4,000 clinics nationwide.

When the Veterans Affairs Acquisition Academy (VAAA) needed successful training for a mass audience on a wide-ranging topic, it came to Atlas. VAAA’s mission is to increase the competency of the acquisition workforce of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), one of the largest agencies in the U.S. federal government. These acquisition professionals manage a significant portion of VA’s nearly $200 billion annual budget.

One of VAAA’s focus areas is facilities management, because VA operates over 8,200 facilities around the country. The challenge in training VA employees and contractors involved in facilities management is that they range from housekeepers to engineers, and facilities management includes everything from washing sheets to optimizing data security.

Atlas experts addressed the challenge of educating and inspiring this complex audience with agile development of an eight-hour webinar called “Facilities Management 101.” Within weeks of starting the project in the summer of 2018, the Atlas Team readied a prototype that blended human presenters, video, interactive graphics, and gamification. The Atlas Team’s knowledge of the subject matter and existing VAAA assets enabled this rapid design and development. The pilot earned high marks from the participants, and the Facilities Management 101 webinar was ready for roll-out by December 2018.

The Harry W. Colmery Veterans Education Assistance Act of 2017 is popularly known as the “Forever GI Bill” because it indefinitely extends certain Veterans’ benefits. Congress wanted the Act’s 34 provisions implemented promptly to show national support for younger Veterans and their families. Atlas advised the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) on risk, change management, strategic communications, and program management strategies throughout implementation.

Atlas’ first major contribution was helping translate the Act’s mandates into actionable policy. This effort included expert analysis to target existing laws and regulations for updates, drafting language for the changes, and tracking them through the review process. Atlas was able to deliver results rapidly with its deep competency in Veteran’s law and policy combined with rigorous and agile methodologies for research, evaluation, and project management.

Atlas also helped speed up implementation of key provisions, including an innovative program to provide financial aid for high-tech training. “VET TEC” supports Veterans who take classes in IT and media, so they can bring high-demand skills to the government and private industry. Atlas also helped launch the Edith Nourse Rogers STEM Scholarship. With this new scholarship, Veterans will be able to receive additional benefits to pursue teaching certificates or bachelor’s degrees in science, technology, engineering, and math.

When Hurricanes Irma and Maria devastated the U.S. Virgin Islands (USVI) in September of 2017, they didn’t just destroy an estimated 18,500 homes and businesses owned by the territory’s 100,000 residents. They also wrecked two major hospitals and the offices of the Department of Health. Working in temporary quarters, the physicians overseeing the islands’ healthcare system struggled to address the disaster that had just happened. Public health practitioners, health care providers, and communicators had almost no capacity to prepare their population for the next one.

In 2018 Atlas Research took on a role to provide supervisory and technical assistance support to a team of health education and communication professionals located across the territory, partnering with Powell Strategies for a project funded by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). Atlas quickly recruited a team from local experts familiar with the islands’ trilingual culture, trained them, and sent them out into the community to build the Department of Health’s capacity and work to educate and inform about health and disease prevention practices that will matter most when the next hurricane hits.

The team is also providing technical assistance to the Department of Health with communication strategy, planning, and messaging. And when that next major storm arrives, the team on USVI will immediately swing into response mode to help residents avert the public health disaster that often follows a natural one.

Activation for a major medical center requires thousands of interdependent actions for planning, purchasing, delivering, and installing furnishings, equipment, and medical systems; it also requires hiring and training staff and developing concept of operations (CONOPS) and policies for how everything and everyone works.

With its expert capabilities in health care, project management, and information architecture, Atlas has helped the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) activate regional medical centers in Louisiana and Colorado and is now working on major facilities in Nebraska and Florida. Atlas has not only brought industry best practices to these large-scale, mission-critical projects. It has also delivered a new practice that dramatically advances the field.

The Atlas Facility Activation System (AFACTS™) is an information management system that organizes the timing and milestones for all activation tasks and processes while providing VHA’s project leaders with dynamic reporting that empowers agile decision-making. This trademarked system enables early identification of any risks to the critical path, which can then be mitigated to keep the activation on schedule and on budget.

AFACTS™ is the first client-focused tool that Atlas has designed, developed, vetted, and launched. Not only that, VA has approved hosting AFACTS™ on its own web domain and launching it on day one of any activation project that Atlas works on.