Earlier this week, Arcadia announced a partnership with Innovative Management Solutions (IMSNY), a joint venture between two behavioral health organizations that work to improve the quality of life for New Yorkers with serious mental illness, substance use disorders and/or chronic health conditions, children with serious emotional disturbances, and those impacted by social factors such poverty, inadequate housing, and food shortages.
We wanted to share more about why we’re so eager to tackle these critical issues with the team at IMSNY and founding organizations Coordinated Behavioral Care (CBC) and Coordinated Behavioral Health Services IPA (CBHS).
For too long, the conversation about “health care” has focused on physical health. Behavioral health, substance use disorders, and social determinants of health were left on the periphery. However, these diagnoses and challenges can have an enormous impact on quality of life, physical health and overall health outcomes.
On average, 46% of the adult population is struggling with mental health issues and 60% of them never seek treatment from a provider. Meanwhile, 70% of adults who suffer from a behavioral health condition have comorbid medical conditions. Patients with primary or secondary behavioral and mental health conditions typically have poorer physical health outcomes and higher medical utilization.
Many healthcare organizations have struggled with four historic challenges to providing whole-person care, where physical health care is integrated with behavioral health care, substance use treatment, and organization-driven or community-driven efforts to improve social determinants of health and issues of health equity. These four challenges have been:
Under traditional fee-for-service payment models, healthcare organizations had limited financial incentive to invest resources in programs that address behavioral health, substance use, or social determinants of health.
This deficit left providers ill-equipped to respond to patients who raised these concerns during visits: Providers might have difficulty navigating a fragmented behavioral health and substance use treatment market to provide appropriate referrals. Providers often don’t have the resources within their practices required to effectively engage and care for patients in crisis. And without the support of a care team, providers might struggle to manage high risk complex patients while also seeing patients under the traditional fee-for-service model with often grueling schedules. Access to information that would help identify the needs of an individual and at the population level
Meanwhile, providers lacked key insights about the needs of their patient populations in these areas. Data about social determinants of health might not be consistently recorded or accessible for analysis. Behavioral health and substance use disorder information might be stored in silos disconnected from physical health information. And while health plans received claims from across all points of care, behavioral health and substance abuse disorders are often not shared with the provider.
Without a comprehensive picture of the issues impacting their patients, healthcare organizations would have a hard time designing and building a financial case for services in areas other than physical health.
Finally, traditional fee-for-service models provide limited incentives for health plans and providers across the care continuum to share information about patients for better care coordination. Integrating behavioral health care has been especially challenging, given a fragmented provider market and concerns about data-sharing.
The move to value-based payment models align incentives and presents opportunities for healthcare organizations to collaborate on whole-person care initiatives.
Complex organizations entering value-based payment models (like ACOs and CINs) need connective infrastructure to support network-wide performance. This includes underlying technology to aggregate and analyze data from a range of sources across the network including EMRs, laboratory results, claims-based payer feeds and real-time ADT notifications. Advanced analytics capabilities create new possibilities for whole-person care.
One of the most exciting developments associated with the move to value-based payment models is the rise of the connected behavioral health network.
Physical health providers were incentivized to adopt EHRs under Meaningful Use, but behavioral health providers were not. Many behavioral health providers were not considered eligible providers under Medicare program rules, and the original design of the program and its measures were not well-aligned with behavioral health practice. In the absence of the financial incentives associated with Meaningful Use participation, behavioral health providers were much less likely to implement EHRs.
A handful of forward-looking health care systems supported the integration of their behavioral health providers into their EHRs (building custom templates to support them) but the majority of behavioral health practices have not been not digitally connected.
Value-based care brings new incentives for behavioral health providers to capture clinical information digitally and to integrate physical and behavioral health data and operations to support population health management. Pioneers in this space are using data to reimagine behavioral health care delivery.
Connected behavioral health networks like IMSNY will use transformational technology and innovative strategies to improve the quality of care delivered to patients with serious mental illness and substance use disorders, minors with serious emotional disturbances, and chronic health conditions.
We’re proud to provide the analytics infrastructure that will support the innovative team at IMSNY.