The Association for Behavioral Health and Wellness (ABHW) (
https://abhw.org/) is dedicated to advancing federal policy and educating the public on mental health and addiction care. By advocating on behalf of health plans for improved access and higher quality care,ABHW focuses on ensuring better health outcomes for individuals and communities.
ABHW member companies provide coverage to over 200 million people in both the public and private sectors to treat mental health, substance use disorders, and other behaviors that impact health and wellness. ABHW provides thought leadership and advocates for regulations and policies that help provide high quality health care to promote healthy living and improved quality of life.
Next StepsAs we've mentioned with other groups, AMHCA would like to work with ABHW and the behavioral health community and stakeholders in any fashion in securing the primacy of behavioral health--by recognizing the value position of behavioral health within the larger health care landscape by policymakers, considering behavioral health as a core measurement of health status, and reformulating primary care to be more “head-first oriented.”
We would be pleased to work with ABHW to reframe our overall messaging so that policymakers recognize the value proposition that behavioral health stakeholders offer to our communities. As a followup to our discussion, we are going to explore potential ways where we could collaborate. Some of the areas included working with you on sponsoring a joint webinar (or two) in early 2020 where AMHCA representatives could spotlight specific clinical issues of interest to ABHW members, and as part of that process, discuss how to facilitate access connections between ABHW’s organizational members, clinical mental health counselors and beneficiaries/insureds. Those discussions could include the use of specific occupational codes. We also discussed opportunities on how we can better push effective integration strategies and outcomes data to improve these new systems
On the external organization side, we discussed how we could better interface withCMMI and CMS representatives, which ww will look into in the short term. Moreover, we would like to engage the “Better Medicare Alliance (BMA)” to gain their support on the Medicare Mental Health Access Improvement Act.We asked if there is anything ABHW can do on that front to facilitate a conversation with BMA. We also explored other potential bridge-building strategies such as sharing and posting respective content on our websites, offering complimentary exhibit space at our respective conferences or related events, and sharing other resources that could address the mission and needs of each organization