Over the past decade, insurance providers and self-insured health systems in the United States have increasingly moved toward value-based-care models that tie a portion of reimbursement to patient outcomes. This has fueled advances across fields from primary care to management of diabetes and cardiac conditions. Mental health care has been slow to make this shift, sticking with fee-for-service schemes that reward utilization: The more sessions a patient has, the more the provider makes, regardless of whether the patient improves. This system creates a disincentive for therapists to pursue the most rapid and effective treatment for their patients.
An Outcomes-Focused Approach to Mental Health Care
Five considerations for mental-health-care providers, insurers, and employers.
March 03, 2023
Summary.
Standardized tools now allow employers or insurers to track the effectiveness of mental health care. This, in turn, is making it possible to create contracts that tie reimbursement to the effectiveness of the treatment. In this article, the authors, who are the cofounders of a platform for delivering virtual mental health care, offer five considerations when creating such contracts.