Kenneth Wells, M.D., M.P.H.
Director, UCLA Health Services Research Center
Director, UCLA/RAND NIMH Center for Research on Quality in Managed Care

I'm pleased to welcome you to our website, which provides a virtual tour of our goals and activities. The Center conducts research to understand how health services are delivered and to improve health services for persons with psychiatric and neurologic disorders across the lifespan. Our focus ranges from access to care to how parity legislation and consumer education affects access, costs, quality and outcomes of services provided. We have been developing a range of interventions and toolkits to support healthcare systems and providers in improving services for the disorders we study, and we are conducting rigorous evaluations of the effectiveness and costs of these programs. While we have focused mainly on depression, schizophrenia and dementia, we also conduct studies on post-traumatic stress disorder, attention deficit disorder, panic disorders and other psychiatric and neurologic disorders.

We have a strong focus on community-based research and collaborate with many community agencies, healthcare practices and plans, purchasers, and consumer groups both locally and nationally. Our broad goal is to effectively use research to improve public mental health and mental healthcare delivery in ways that are consistent with the goals, priorities and resources of such diverse stakeholders. We are increasingly focusing on understanding the different perspectives of these stakeholders to design more effective treatment delivery strategies. In particular, our goals are to sustain improvements in treatment and mental health outcomes.

The Center houses UCLA clinical faculty that includes adult psychiatrists and psychologists, child and geriatric psychiatry specialists, and staff, including doctoral level social scientists, master's level statisticians, and research and administrative staff.

The Center is also the administrative lead site for a combined UCLA/RAND NIMH Center for Research on Quality in Managed Care, which is funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, and Healthcare for Communities, which is a large national study that tracks changes in mental health and substance abuse care. Healthcare for Communities is funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. These projects integrate diverse clinical and social science researchers from both UCLA and RAND. RAND is a nonprofit private research corporation that conducts policy work in the public interest. Our combined faculty includes clinicians, economists, sociologists, statisticians, anthropologists, social psychologists, historians and researchers from various other fields.

The Center focuses on addressing health disparities and disadvantaged or under-served populations. We train researchers in mental health services research to appropriately study and prioritize vulnerable populations. The Center is integrated with the activities of several research training programs, including the NIMH Faculty Scholars Program and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Clinical Scholars Program. In addition, we work closely with research centers at the Veterans Administration, including the Mental Illness Research, Education and Clinical Care Center (MIRECC) and Field Program for Study of Change in Provider Behavior.

Visit our website and contact us for further information about projects, programs and materials.