Retiring SSA Director from Delaware will continue pioneering work on performance based contracting and other policy reforms.
February 2008: A. Thomas McLellan, Ph.D. and Mady Chalk, Ph.D. announced today that Jack Kemp, recently retired Director of Substance Abuse Services for the State of Delaware, will join the Treatment Research Institute as Senior Policy Associate effective February 15.
The appointment sustains a collaboration that began in 2001 when Kemp partnered with McLellan and others at TRI on the evaluation of a statewide performance based contracting system paying substance abuse treatment providers for results, not services. The novel purchasing experiment combined monetary incentives for providers with other initiatives to improve capacity utilization rates and extend treatment stays – and saw dramatic improvements in both.
“Jack’s appointment is a real coup for TRI,” McLellan said. “He has been a top performer in the field – a believer in innovation and creating evidence through practice. Now he’ll get wider exposure and the chance to work with other states on projects that improve quality through administrative and purchasing reform – something he knows quite a bit about.”
Kemp will split his time between TRI and the Delaware SSA where he is seeing several projects through to completion. At TRI he will work with Dr. Chalk, primarily on the Mutual Assistance Program for States, “MAPS,” a collaborative she launched late 2006 under which state policy makers work with researchers to reform government policy and practices that may be impeding quality improvement efforts.
“Jack Kemp will be a tremendous asset to MAPS and the states,” Chalk said. “He believes, as do we, that smart purchasing and administrative reform can lead to quality improvement. He has the know-how to lead others where he has gone before,” she said.
