Hyunjung Kim, Steve Huz, Rod MacDonald
In 1999, New York State enacted “Kendra’s Law” (§9.60 of the Mental Hygiene Law) that introduced Assisted Outpatient Treatment (AOT) program. The goal of AOT is to ensure that people with mental illness who are transitioning from hospitals or correctional facilities to the community receive necessary psychiatric medications without interruption. Back in year 2000, Rod MacDonald built a system dynamics model for the New York State Office of Mental Health representing an expected path of the system behaviors related to the AOT implementation. Rod’s model was built when there was not much data available regarding the program, and later it was found to be a good predictor of the system behavior. The modeling work was revived in 2007 with Hyunjung working on the project. The new modeling effort has been concentrated in identifying the meaning of the equilibrium state of the system and how different system participants view the system boundary differently and how such differences affect the program implementation. We would like to get your feedback in terms of how to turn this into an interesting publication.