RAND researchers sought to identify how many U.S. military service members and their dependents are remote from behavioral health care and the effects of this distance on their access to and use of care.
Given the challenges posed to the U.S. corrections sector, such as tightened budgets and increasingly complex populations under its charge, it is valuable to identify opportunities where changes in tools, practices, or approaches could improve performance. In this report, RAND researchers, with the help of a practitioner Corrections Advisory Panel, seek to map out an innovation agenda for the sector.
Concerns about access to behavioral health care for military service members and their dependents living in geographically remote locations prompted research into how many in this population are remote and the effects of this distance on their use of behavioral health care. The authors conducted geospatial and longitudinal analyses to answer these questions and reviewed current policies and programs to determine barriers and possible solutions.
The authors developed and applied a methodology that leveraged detailed combat effectiveness models to account for the operational energy needs of an Armored Brigade Combat Team (ABCT) 2020 and the current ABCT conducting combat missions. The methodology enables a system-level examination of the interplay of all the elements on the battlefield, including the Blue combat force, the Red threat, and the support and protection forces.
This report examines the feasibility for non-state actors, including terrorist and insurgent groups, to increase their political and/or economic power by deploying a virtual currency (VC) for use in regular economic transactions. This report should be of interest to policymakers interested in technology, counterterrorism, and intelligence and law enforcement issues, as well as for VC and cybersecurity researchers.
The Gulf Cooperation Council countries experience an alarming increase chronic disease, yet their health care systems are ill-prepared to handle that burden. We recommend that they pioneer a health care delivery model based on population health management principles and sophisticated health information technology, rather than copy existing Western models.
This report presents the result of the July 2014 Law Enforcement Futuring Workshop, in which a diverse group of law enforcement practitioners explored future visions of law enforcement and identified and prioritized needs in technology, policy, and practice based on those visions.
In 2011, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation extended grants to three organizations involved with competency-based education approaches. RAND examined these organizations' implementation, student experiences, and student outcomes.
Competency-based education meets students where they are academically, provides students with opportunities for choice, and awards credit for evidence of learning, not for the time students spend studying a subject. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation asked RAND to evaluate three competency-based education grants in terms of implementation, students' experiences, and student performance.
Incorporating different service requirements in a single joint aircraft design can lead to greater program complexity, increased technical risk, and weight in excess of what an individual service needs, and these factors can increase program costs.
A RAND research team examined options to increase the mobility, protection, and firepower of Army airborne forces, given likely future missions and threats, and identified a concept for enhancing today's forces by adding a light armored infantry capability. This report examines the numbers and types of vehicles that would be needed to create an airborne light armored force that could be airdropped or air-landed from Air Force transport planes.
The authors describe the barriers that hinder family engagement with early childhood education and the ways in which technology may afford new opportunities to overcome these barriers — empowering families to become better educators at home, and strengthening connection and communication between school and home.
The authors describe efforts that might be helpful in creating confident, knowledgeable providers of early childhood education who can help ensure appropriate, intentional, and productive use of technology among young children.
Technology use among young children is increasingly a fact of life, but debates about the role of technology in early childhood education (ECE) are ongoing, with some stakeholders unwilling to accept any role for technology in ECE. Based on findings from a forum and review of the literature, the authors offer ways to move past that debate and suggest several core goals that might be adopted to guide technology use in ECE.
The perceived shortage of cybersecurity professionals working on national security may endanger the nation's networks and be a disadvantage in cyberspace conflict. RAND examined the cybersecurity labor market, especially in regard to national defense. Analysis suggests market forces and government programs will draw more workers into the profession in time, and steps taken today would not bear fruit for another five to ten years.
Identifies promising policy options to spur the creation of new medical technologies that will reduce total U.S. health care spending or will provide health benefits that justify any increase in spending.
To realize the potential benefits of technology use in early childhood education, and to ensure that technology can help to address the digital divide, providers, families of young children, and young children themselves must have access to an adequate technology infrastructure that allows them to perform all the tasks and functions that flow from goals for technology use. The authors examine how stakeholders might collaborate to define what constitutes an adequate technology architecture and help ensure it is realized.
Using screen time as the primary measure of "developmentally appropriate" technology use by young children has become increasingly inappropriate as new technologies are introduced and as we learn more about the potential benefits of technology. The authors challenge the traditional emphasis on screen time and discuss how to move toward a more comprehensive definition of developmentally appropriate technology use in early childhood education.
Telemedicine offers the potential for better care, lower costs, and increased convenience. Expanding existing fee-for-service payment models to include telemedicine may lead to its overuse. Already there are many skeptics among payers and providers regarding this method of payment. The greatest potential for effective and efficient use of telemedicine services lies in the use of emerging payment models.
The primary purpose of the Programming Computation on Encrypted Data (PROCEED) program is to improve the efficiency of algorithms that allow people to carry out computations on encrypted data — without having to decrypt the data itself. RAND was asked to evaluate whether PROCEED — which expands the knowledge base of the global cryptographic community — is likely to provide more benefits to the United States than it does to its global rivals.
New medical technologies are a leading driver of U.S. health care spending. This report identifies promising policy options to change which medical technologies are created, with two related policy goals: (1) Reduce total health care spending with the smallest possible loss of health benefits, and (2) ensure that new medical products that increase spending are accompanied by health benefits that are worth the spending increases.
Many children in low-income families in the United States are not able to access and use technology in the same ways as their more-advantaged peers. This means they may not be able to benefit from enhanced educational opportunities, and they will have fewer chances to develop the workforce skills they will need to succeed in later life. This Perspective explores the potential role of early childhood education in addressing the digital divide.
The U.S. Army's Command and General Staff School offers its Advanced Operations Course (AOC) for junior field-grade officers using both traditional resident instruction and a model referred to as blended distributed learning (BDL). This report assesses the effectiveness of AOC-BDL based on student and graduate surveys and identifies best practices for BDL from empirical research and case studies.
STREAM is a process that transportation agencies can use to identify, assess, shape, and adopt new and emerging technologies to help achieve long-term system performance objectives.
This fact sheet describes the results of research into the factors influencing physician professional satisfaction and their implications for health care.
