The Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) plans to hold a one-day summit in September to solicit feedback and ideas for a potential behavioral health model to improve access, quality and cost of care for beneficiaries with behavioral health conditions.
This week, CMS announced that its Center for Medicare & Medicaid Innovation (CMMI) is interested in designing a health payment model to improve health care quality and access, while lowering the cost of care for Medicare, Medicaid or Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) beneficiaries with behavioral health conditions.
CMS will host the summit Friday, September 8th at CMS headquarters in Baltimore, and it is open to the public.
According to the event’s registration page, the Summit will convene community health organizations, medical societies, patient advocacy groups, government and non-government organizations, and other interested stakeholders care to discuss behavioral health payment and delivery related to the following topics—substance use disorders; mental health disorders in the presence of co-occurring conditions; Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias and behavioral health workforce challenges.
Feedback provided during the summit may be used by the Innovation Center to inform the design of potential payment model and service delivery model tests focused on behavioral health topics, including opioid abuse and other substance use disorders, serious mental illness, dementia and approaches to improve behavioral health provider participation in Medicare/Medicaid, the integration of behavioral health services, as well as the use of telehealth-enabled care, CMS stated.
An agenda for the event can be found here, and the Federal Register notice can be found here.
