Value-Based Mental Health Care

What Is Value-Based Healthcare?

The goal with value-based healthcare is twofold: keep costs lower for the patients and improve patient health. To do this, value-based healthcare incentivizes healthcare providers to prioritize the quality of their services over the quantity by tying payment to patient outcomes.

Instead of a fee-for-service model, which encourages clinicians to see as many patients as possible, the value-based care framework encourages healthcare providers to focus on getting the best results for the patients. In turn, clinicians receive a higher level of reimbursement when they help patients achieve better outcomes.

Benefits of Value-Based Health Care

The attention to quality care can have real benefits for patients and providers alike. It minimizes healthcare costs over the long term by helping patients recover more quickly and avoid chronic diseases. That means they likely won’t need as many medical visits, tests, procedures, or medications.

For healthcare providers, value-based care can boost patient satisfaction. It also frees up time that would otherwise be spent on chronic disease management.

Value-based healthcare can also be better for society as a whole by encouraging the development of a healthier population and reducing the costs spent on healthcare across the country.

Value-Based Care for Mental Health

There are plenty of ways that value-based care can be applied to traditional medical specialties. When it comes to physical health, it’s much easier to track certain markers of health.

Mental health can be more challenging when it comes to implementing value-based healthcare because there aren’t always straightforward ways to track patient progress. For example, it’s tough to come up with broad agreements on what should be considered an effective outcome. While success for one patient may be better control over ADHD symptoms, another might be considered successful with well-managed inpatient psychiatric care.

However, researchers are working to develop better ways to measure outcomes in mental health. For example, a study in New York found that 75% of practices enrolled in a value-based payment system were able to improve clinical measures like reducing admissions and improving follow-up post-discharge.

Value-Based Care for ADHD

There are concerns that ADHD can be misdiagnosed, particularly in young children, because there is no straightforward test that can be performed to indicate the disorder. Instead, it requires detailed screenings and a deep understanding of the complex nature of ADHD symptoms. When clinicians are seeing too many patients in a day, they might not have the time to devote to an individual to determine whether ADHD is really the cause of their behaviors.

Value-based care for ADHD may be able to help address this issue. When clinicians are incentivized to get the best outcomes rather than to see as many patients as possible, they are more likely to devote sufficient time to the patient to get to the root cause of their symptoms and help each individual achieve the best outcomes.