Whenever in accordance with the State of Parity report released at the February 26 meeting by the Kennedy Forum, founded by former congressman Patrick Kennedy in 2013 and the Scattergood Foundation, insurers still circumvent the law’s requirements. Samuel Nussbaum, MD, executive vice president and chief medical officer for Anthem, Inc, said that insurers are often stymied when attempting to apply both the letter and the spirit of parity, in part because of a lack of evidence. So data can also be used to show that mental health care services work, she said. As long as you show that you are improving outcomes, that kind of data collection can make your organization more valuable to insurers, she said.
Accordingly a Joint Commission committee will review the proposed requirement in March.
The requirement will so be made available for comment by accredited organizations, and it could be reviewed by the Joint Commission’s board.
So it’s hoped that the new standard could be announced in July, VanAmringe ld Medscape Medical News. Organizations will also be required to assess outcomes on a populationwide basis and to use the information for continuous quality improvement, VanAmringe said. You can find a lot more information about it on this website. The new policy will require a standardized method of measurement that is sensitive enough to show that an intervention improved a patient’s outcome. In turn, the data might be used to reduce coverage exclusions, that are still common despite laws that require benefit parity for medical and mental health services, like the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act of 2008. As a result, systematically tracking and reporting outcomes could Actually the Joint Commission hopes to there’s no requirement to use standardized measurement ols or to aggregate patient data, she added, the current standard for the 2300 behavioral healthcare organizations it accredits requires outcomes assessments. Use of the new standard should not be required until January 2017 about the time that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services will start payment for its collaborative care model, that was made final in the 2016 Medicare fee schedule rule. And so it’s still not clear what that model will look like or how physicians gonna be reimbursed. Certainly, the CMS will propose the details of that methodology this year, said Patrick Conway, MD, the agency’s acting principal deputy administrator, at the meeting.