A new RAND study finds that many patients don't have the option to choose whether their behavioral health visit is in-person or virtual. About one-third of patients going to therapy or visiting a behavioral health provider for medication said their clinicians didn't offer both telehealth and in-person care. Additionally, 32 percent said they did not typically receive the type of visit they wanted, and 45 percent did not believe their clinician considered their preference. This highlights the importance of implementing telehealth “in a manner that expands, rather than contracts, behavioral health access and options for patients,” said lead author Jessica Sousa. Read more »

More students may be seeing police officers in their schools as they head back to class this fall. The increased use of school resource officers, as they are known, is primarily driven by a fear of mass shootings. But according to a study by Lucy Sorensen and Yinzhi Shen of the University at Albany (SUNY) and RAND's Shawn Bushway, there isn't enough evidence to know whether placing officers in schools changes the probability of a shooting. Further, although the presence of an officer appears to reduce fights and petty crimes in schools, it also leads to more suspensions, expulsions, and arrests among students—all of which have measurable negative downstream effects. Read more »