It’s evident that there is still a challenge with access to mental health support. There’s a provider shortage, and the available providers’ time slots fill up quickly. But more than that, receiving quality mental health care is also difficult. Payers collect a lot of data on patient care, but it’s not always obvious how good that care was.
This is according to Dr. Taft Parsons, chief psychiatric officer of CVS Health, during an interview at the recent Behavioral Health Tech conference in San Diego. He argued that in order to improve the quality of care in behavioral health, there needs to be better guidelines for what good actually looks like.
And this may require some action from lawmakers.
“I personally think that the way to really get to consensus broadly is something that takes policy action,” he said. “We certainly want to participate in defining what good looks like. But it’s hard for payers, providers, advocates, everybody … to all be on the exact same page of, ‘What does good look like?’ And I think that sometimes the only way that that happens is when there is a policy that says we’re going to define it.”
Parsons added that care in behavioral health is oftentimes measured by, “Did you do a thing?” However, this doesn’t always give the full picture.
“My poster child HEDIS measure for that is follow up after hospitalization,” Parsons said. “Did you get them in for an appointment within seven days? And while that may indicate that across a large number of people, folks that get in within seven days do better than folks that don’t, it doesn’t tell you whether or not that clinician actually did a good medication reconciliation. Did they make sure that social determinants of health needs are met? Did they do the things in that appointment that are actually going to lead to the success of that patient in their health journey?”
He argued that behavioral health should shift from tracking whether clinicians completed tasks to measuring whether patients’ health actually improved.
“The way that that happens is through some of these policy changes that I think have been long overdue on the behavioral health side,” he said. “I won’t say that they’re perfect on the physical health side, but they’re much further along.”
Better defining quality in behavioral health could also help advance value-based care, especially given how differently people interpret good care.
“It’s hard for us, or anybody, to write a value-based contract with that many different variables. When there’s alignment on what is defined as good care, it’s much easier for us all to work together, to actually pay for results instead of pay for activity,” he said.
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