CEO Update 186
2024 NABH Annual Meeting & Hill Day Highlights
NABH thanks all who traveled to Washington last week for the 2024 Annual Meeting!
Photos from the meeting are now available. If you choose to use any of these pictures, please credit photographer Chris Ferenzi.
Last week NABH shared the Annual Meeting slide presentations and learned some attendees had trouble downloading them. We have re-posted the presentations as PDF documents on our 2024 Annual Meeting Speakers & Presentations page. David Wasserman’s presentation will be available until May 31.
We’ve received positive feedback about the NABH Education and Research Foundation’s workforce panel, and we urge you to share NABH’s Workforce Startup Guide with your teams. You can download the guide on NABH’s website homepage.
NABH also thanks all members who participated in Hill Day in conjunction with #NABH2024! Our members met with policymakers and their staff and highlighted the crucial need to secure the promise of parity between behavioral and physical healthcare, increase the behavioral healthcare workforce, and invest in behavioral health information technology to adopt electronic health records.
NABH members conducted more than 60 congressional meetings and prioritized key offices for policymakers who serve on committees of jurisdiction overseeing behavioral healthcare policy, including the Senate Finance Committee, Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pension Committee, House Energy and Commerce Committee, and House Ways and Means Committee.
Please save the date for next year’s Annual Meeting: May 12-14, 2025 at the Salamander Washington, DC!
House Committees Advance Telehealth Extension Bills
The House Energy & Commerce Health Subcommittee on May 16 unanimously advanced telehealth legislation to the full House Energy & Commerce Committee that would extend for two years key COVID-19 pandemic telehealth waivers scheduled to expire at the end of this year.
The bill that the Subcommittee advanced – similar to the bill the House Ways & Means Committee passed in the previous week – would delay the in-person requirement and originating site restrictions for mental health services and extend the provision for audio-only telehealth services for the next two years. Both bills also include a five-year extension of waivers for the Acute Hospital Care at Home program, allowing patients to receive hospital-level care in their homes until 2029.
The House Energy & Commerce’s bill includes payment parity for federally qualified health centers and rural health clinics, so they can bill the same amount for telehealth and in-person outpatient services. Under the House Ways & Means Committee’s bill, the centers would be reimbursed at lower rates for most virtual services.
Meanwhile, the Energy & Commerce panel also advanced a second telehealth bill that would establish a Medicare incident to modifier for mental health services furnished through telehealth. Both committees’ bills include offsets that impose new transparency requirements on pharmacy benefit managers and delay the upcoming changes to Medicare payment rates for clinical lab tests by one year.
The Senate has yet to take up a telehealth extension bill, although Senate Finance Committee Chair Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) is pushing to extend permanently some of the COVID-19-era telehealth flexibilities set to expire at the end of this calendar year. If Congress passes a short-term telehealth extension, lawmakers will have to restart the process after it expires.
Final Medicaid Rule Reduces Allowed Wait Times for Behavioral Healthcare Outpatient Appointments
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) recently published a Medicaid final rule that includes positive changes on several NABH priority issues.
NABH is pleased that beginning in June 2027, wait times for adult and pediatric outpatient mental health and substance use disorder (SUD) services will be subject to a 10-day maximum. Also, starting in 2028, states will be required to conduct annual “secret shopper” surveys to investigate whether managed care plans are meeting wait time requirements and the validity of provider directories.
In July 2027, states must survey Medicaid enrollees to assess their managed care experience. Finally, to help CMS understand and improve payment adequacy, beginning in July 2026, states must annually submit payment data that compare state Medicaid managed care plan rates with Medicare or Medicaid state plan rates, including specific data for mental health and SUD services.
This CMS fact sheet provides additional details about the final rule.
ONC Funding Opportunity Seeks to Accelerate BHIT
HHS’ Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) on May 13 announced a funding opportunity totaling $2 million for fiscal year 2024 under the Leading Edge Acceleration Projects (LEAP) in Health Information Technology (Health IT).
ONC is seeking applications that address two areas of interest. The first area seeks to develop innovative ways to evaluate and improve the quality of healthcare data used in artificial intelligence (AI) tools in healthcare to improve electronic health record technologies.
The second area is focused on designing, developing, and piloting lightweight health IT solutions that can enhance health IT capabilities in behavioral healthcare settings and improve care coordination between behavioral healthcare and clinical healthcare settings.
“These two areas of interest are a natural extension of ONC’s work,” Steve Posnack, deputy national coordinator for health information technology and an NABH 2024 Annual Meeting speaker, said in a statement. “We look forward to receiving innovative applications and seeing the impacts generated by selected awardees.”
Click here to learn more about the grant opportunity.
Reminder: Please Submit Data to NABH’s Denial-of-Care Portal
NABH thanks all members who have submitted data to the association’s Denial-of-Care Portal. You have provided critical information that expands the portal and helps NABH strengthen its advocacy efforts related to erroneous prior-authorization denials.
With guidance from our members, NABH has improved the portal by adding two elements:
- Time-based data on the number of days between a request for coverage and a plan’s denial, which improves our ability to assess and compare health plan responsiveness.
- The gap between days of provided care versus days of covered care to quantify and compare uncompensated days per health plan.
We strongly encourage all NABH members to submit their denial-of-care data in the portal. If you need help starting, or if you have other questions, please e-mail NABH Associate Manager for Congressional Affairs Emily Wilkins.
Fact of the Week
A new study of more than 1.2 million people has identified 95 regions of the genome linked to PTSD, and 80 of those have not been identified previously. Researchers also identified 43 genes that seem to play a role in causing PTSD.
For questions or comments about this CEO Update, please contact Jessica Zigmond.