Using a Model to Evaluate the Impact of Managed Care on Medicaid-Eligible Moms and Their Children in a Rural Population

This paper lays out the advantages of using a model for developing research questions and methodologies aimed at evaluating how managed care arrangements for rural Medicaid moms and their children might affect their access to health care and their related health status. The PRECEDE (predisposing, reinforcing, and enabling causes in educational diagnosis and evaluation) health-education program planning model is refined and applied to a population of Medicaid-eligible moms and their children to help organize and clarify the research questions and to identify the types of variables we need to consider for this exercise. An explanation of those variables, why they are important, and how they can be obtained is presented.