Melissa Azur’s work focuses on improving behavioral health services for adults and children.
She currently directs a project that is developing a quality-of-care measure for adults with post-traumatic stress disorder, working with stakeholders to identify measure concepts and develop and pretest a survey of the delivery of evidence-based psychotherapy for adults with PTSD. Azur led the development of quality measures for the national Inpatient Psychiatric Facility Quality Reporting program and is a senior adviser for this Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Service (CMS) project. She played a similar role on a project to develop and test measures to assess the quality and appropriateness of behavioral health care provided in ambulatory settings. Also for CMS, she leads the design and implementation of a quantitative evaluation of a 12-state demonstration that is testing federal reimbursement for emergency psychiatric inpatient services provided to adult Medicaid beneficiaries.
Her research for the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration has examined characteristics of people who received mental health treatment services. For the Department of Defense, she studied experiences of adults at risk for PTSD and experiences of children and adults in the military health system.
Azur holds a Ph.D. in mental health from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and an M.S. in emergency health services from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
Caring for our veterans’ mental health is a national priority. About 4 million veterans served in Iraq and Afghanistan between 2001 and 2014.
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