Can Clinical Mental Health Counselors help primary-care providers by tackling systematically the mental health problems of their chronically ill patients? The answer is a hugeYES.
Here’s the game plan what I call the new “Integration Value Chain Loop.”
- First, clinical mental health counselors need to help stakeholders successfully build procedures and standardized care processes targeted at tertiary prevention.
- Once tertiary prevention is recognized as the best way to control costs and provide superior care, health plans will routinely integrate standardized mental health interventions into primary care practices.
- Then CMHCs will be able to participate in health plan networks due to their expertise in prevention.
- The long-term result will be that patients’ mental health problems will be taken seriously—and seriously addressed by the mainstream.
The change in treatment of those with co-morbid conditions will occur because health systems find it necessary to embrace two worthy goals: improving quality of health care, and slowing down the rate of health care expenditures for large, employer-purchaser policyholders.
Role of the CMHCs in Accelerating Integration
What can you as a CMHC do now?
- Begin Using a Certified Electronic Health Record (EHR)
- Know the Cost of Services by Program
- Know Current Access to Care
- Know Current Productivity
- Use Evidence-Based Practices and Measure Outcomes Objectively to Improve Quality!
- Measure Change Over Time Often – Adjust to Increase Quality!
- Follow Through on Provide Preventative Services
- Build Relationships with other Providers – Share and Coordinate Care!
- Create Data-Based Evidence to Demonstrate Quality and Efficiency (cost saving) Service Delivery
- Develop Sample Outcomes with Objective Data to Demonstrate Quality and Efficiency
- Engage Patients with Patient Portals
- Help Patients self-manage their Health, Wellness, and Recovery
- Use Concurrent Documentation and Involve Patients in Decisions
It is critically important to meet with health plans and insurance companies ASAP!
- Form Relationships Yesterday!
- Give Them your Business Cards
- Offer Them Tours of your Facility, and Describe your Treatment Methods & Services
- Use the State Association to Provide an Education Day and Offer Resources
CMHCs should:
- Play a major role in formulating integrated care solutions by defining their role and benefit to patients.
- Work closely with other health care professionals to monitor and ensure that agreed-upon policies and standards result in the best care for patients and families. Special emphasis should be placed on working with CMS and other federal agencies in developing quality metrics for integrated care to be implemented through the patient registries.
- Inventory current models with data on best practices for CMHCs, health care leaders, and policymakers.
Integrated Care: A Health Care Reform Imperative
With or without the Affordable Care Act (ACA), health care reform through new delivery and financing models is moving forward. Health care reform is not simply about what is codified in the ACA. There are market forces – as well as other state and federal initiatives – that predate the ACA, and will persist going forward.
Integration of mental health and primary care services with an emphasis on tertiary prevention is part of those marketplace and regulatory imperatives.
And future integrated systems of care are going to be comprehensive, coordinated, multi-disciplinary, and co-located – and connected through the latest technologies. Furthermore, as we move in this new coordinated direction, CMHCs use of evidence-based treatment approaches will need to be accelerated.
Integrated care models hold promise in addressing many of the challenges facing our health care system. The clinical and policy expertise that CMHCs possess as “Primary Mental Health Care Providers” and can deliver will be invaluable to primary care physicians in developing innovations in integration to improve the nation’s public’s health, with the goal of dramatically reducing the unacceptable high morbidity and mortality rates experienced by Americans with mental illness.