How Behavioral Health Payers and Providers Benefit from Population Management
December 22, 2016 Jacob Levenson
In part three of four-part video series on the management of Behavioral Health Populations we return to a conversation between MAP CEO, Jacob Levenson and MAP Clinical Director, Tom Kimball, Ph. D., LMFT as they discuss the industry’s change in direction and the obstacles faced by payers and providers in Behavioral Health.
Why are we headed in this direction?
Tom: From a clinical standpoint, population health management will assist providers in getting the information they need to refine their process of providing treatment, providing support to people that struggle with behavioral health issues. And that information continues to fold on into itself until we maybe become so efficient and so good at what we’re doing that we can refine it to individual kinds of focus of treatment, individual focus of helping people with specific kinds of behavioral health issues.
Jacob: We’re moving towards a focus on population health management because, frankly, population health management works. It helps us identify where we can be more efficient and where there’s opportunities to improve clinical outcomes and reducing associated health care expense within various populations. So as we have more people come into the health care system, as we have health care consumers getting smarter and demanding more from providers -- and payers, their health insurance carriers -- we have to understand how can we deliver better medicine and how can we deliver solutions to the marketplace?
What are the obstacles faced by Payers and Providers in Behavioral Health?
Tom: Some of the obstacles that are facing providers have to do with the size of their company. If you think about a big provider they will have the resources to expand their services, and to enter into this space, and into the behavioral health management area. The smaller treatment providers, the smaller behavioral health providers, are going to have a harder time because this is not an acute care model anymore.
Jacob: Tom’s right, the world is really changing from an acute model into a chronic model. Payers and health care consumers, especially when there’s a patient with a chronic disease involved, those payers and those consumers are expecting that provider to be involved with that patient and have a stake in their well-being across the entire treatment continuum. As we speak that’s pushing a lot of these providers to provide post-acute, after discharge, to provide services to these folks which historically they’ve never done. So that introduces new technologies, new treatment models, and really is revolutionizing the space -- as what we really see happening is most of these providers are beginning to adopt a post discharge telehealth division within their practice.
