Autism Service Disparities Research: 60 Medicaid Studies Review

Rapid evidence review of 60 peer-reviewed articles examining disparities in autism service utilization using U.S. Medicaid claims data. It was compiled following Cochrane and PRISMA guidelines from a search of five databases, focusing on studies of autistic populations.

Use Cases

• Analyze the distribution of studied age groups (e.g., school-aged children and young adults) across the 60 articles to identify research gaps.
• Categorize the types of autism services (e.g., pharmacological and therapeutic) examined for disparities in the included studies.
• Map the individual-level and system-level factors analyzed for variation in service utilization across the reviewed literature.
• Assess the geographic and demographic representation within the U.S. Medicaid population across the 60 studies.

Strengths

• Includes 60 peer-reviewed articles that met strict inclusion criteria.
• Review methodology follows established Cochrane Rapid Review and PRISMA guidelines.
• Focuses on a specific and policy-relevant data source: U.S. Medicaid claims.

Limitations

• The underlying data is a review of studies, not primary patient-level claims data, limiting direct analysis.
• Findings are limited by the scope of the included literature, which primarily represents school-aged children and young adults (ages 6–21).
• As a document-based dataset (DOCX), structured quantitative analysis requires manual extraction or parsing.

Provenance

Source

Literature search across ERIC, SCOPUS, PubMed, CINAHL Plus, and PsycINFO.

Collection Method

Rapid evidence review following Cochrane and PRISMA guidelines, managed with Covidence.

Time Range

null

Freshness

Last updated March 2026.

Geography

United States