CEO Update 204
2025 NABH Board Nominations Are Due Monday, Oct. 21!
NABH’s Selection Committee needs your help as it considers possible nominees to serve on the NABH Board of Trustees in 2025.
Please help us identify potential candidates for:
- Board Chair-Elect
- Two Board Seats
The Selection Committee is particularly interested in identifying senior managers who represent the broad diversity within the NABH membership, including various levels of care, organizational structures, and size.
Please download a nomination form to share your recommendations of individuals you would like to see included in the single slate for 2025. Please attach a curriculum vitae (CV) for each person you recommend. This will help the Selection Committee in its deliberations. You are welcome to suggest yourself.
Please return this form and candidates’ CVs by Monday, Oct. 21, 2024 to maria@nabh.org.
Thank you for your time.
NABH Thanks Sheppard Pratt for Hosting a Successful Unit Committee Leadership Forum!
NABH member Sheppard Pratt graciously welcomed the NABH Behavioral Health Services within General Healthcare Systems Committee (Unit Committee) to Baltimore last week for the Unit Committee’s annual leadership forum.
The Committee enjoyed two days of hospital tours, presentations, and networking. Attendees toured two Sheppard Pratt facilities—the state-of-the-art Baltimore/Washington campus and the historic Towson campus. While networking with peers was a highlight, seeing the Aurora Borealis over Baltimore’s Inner Harbor during the group’s dinner cruise was a stand-out memory!
The tour of the Baltimore/Washington campus, featuring extra space for future growth, highlighted the staff and CannonDesign’s patient-friendly design, with its focus on natural materials, abundant light, and integration with the wetlands surrounding the hospital.
After a delicious and nutritious lunch catered by the same chef that cooks for patients, attendees learned from the CannonDesign team about the wide array of customized unit spaces the firm has created nationwide, as well as about the facility-design trends of the future, including an aging population, earlier clinical intervention, home-based care, integration with primary care, and the growth of outpatient care.
Sheppard Pratt Solutions Vice President and COO Stephen Merz led a discussion about Crisis Care and psychiatric urgent care, a unique, patient-centered intake model, and his work with local governments for funding and implementation.
Finally, leaders shared keys to effective dyadic relationships based on trust and respect, along with the blending of professional skills and styles.
The group concluded the second day on the Towson campus. Geisinger Health and Main Line Health leaders discussed best practices for managing recovery centers in acute care systems. Michael Abbatiello, operations executive at Sheppard Pratt, led a discussion about major pain points for members of the committee. The meeting closed with the designers of the Yale Patient Experience tool, referred to by CMS as the “PIX,” which will be used in CY 2025 for voluntary reporting, with mandatory reporting to follow. Attendees also had the opportunity to visit Sheppard Pratt’s museum, Institute for Advanced Diagnostics, and Psychiatric Urgent Care department.
NABH thanks the entire Sheppard Pratt team for its planning and gracious hospitality and all who attended this year’s Leadership Forum!
NABH Thanks Director of Quality and Addiction Services Sarah Wattenberg!
NABH and its Washington-based team thanks Sarah Wattenberg, the association’s director of quality and addiction services since 2018, for her excellent work and dedication to improving policies, regulations, and protocols that help open access to quality care for people with substance use disorders.
Sarah is retiring from the behavioral healthcare field and her last day at NABH is today, Friday, Oct. 18. Sarah’s industrious career includes positions at HHS at both the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration and the Assistant Secretary for Health, where she worked on critical issues of the day, including privacy, electronic health records, performance measures, the Affordable Care Act, opioids, marijuana, college drinking, financing, and workforce.
In a farewell letter to colleagues, Sarah noted that this quote from former HHS Secretary Hubert Humphrey – inscribed in a plaque on a wall at HHS – refreshed her commitment to public service every day: “The moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; and those who are in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy, and the handicapped.”
We all thank Sarah and wish her many years of continued success and happiness in her retirement!
CMS Provides Temporary Flexibilities to All-Inclusive Cost Reporters
Following ongoing communication with NABH, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) posted online official guidance for inpatient psychiatric facilities (IPF) that, based on the agency’s fiscal year 2025 final rule, must phase out “all-inclusive” reporting for cost reports beginning on or after Oct. 1, 2024. This shift requires IPF hospitals to change their charge structure to include ancillary costs and charges, such as those for lab and drug items.
Under a new and temporary option for this subset of IPFs, CMS will provide flexibility for those IPFs that will require extra time to implement reporting of ancillary costs and charges. Specifically, the CMS guidance applies to providers that are unable to complete the transition to ancillary reporting for the full 12 months of cost reporting periods beginning between Oct. 1, 2024 – May 31, 2025. Such hospitals may ask their Medicare Administrative Contractor (MAC) to use an alternate cost reporting methodology on a temporary basis.
If the MAC approves the request, a provider may report estimated ancillary charges using a six-step process to extrapolate ancillary costs and charges from at least a portion of the cost reporting cycle to the full cycle.
Please carefully review this multi-step process in the online guidance, which NABH helped develop, and share with NABH any concerns or feedback with this process to nabh@nabh.org.
NABH continues to communicate with CMS representatives about this complex transition. As part of this advocacy, please complete the related survey that NABH will send to members on Monday, Oct. 21. The survey will ask all of NABH’s all-inclusive members to estimate the timing of their sites’ compliance with ancillary reporting.
This communication will focus on member sites that will not be able to implement the necessary changes to their charges structure by May 31, 2025, the date targeted in CMS’ guidance. NABH will emphasize the fixed variables that will prevent some sites from achieving full reporting capability by this date, including affordability, supply chain and vendor delays, a shortage of available personnel with training on relevant information technology protocols, and other factors.
As always, thank you for your cooperation!
Reps. Tonko and Turner Seek Feedback on Effects of ‘Mainstreaming Addiction Treatment Act’
Hospitals, insurance plans, pharmacies, pharmacists, and providers were the recipients of inquiries from Reps. Paul D. Tonko (D-N.Y.) and Mike Turner (R-Ohio) to help the lawmakers better understand the impact of the Mainstreaming Addiction Treatment Act, (MAT) a 2023 law that removed the DATA Waiver 2000 as a way to increase the number of medical professionals prescribing buprenorphine for individuals with opioid use disorder.
The goal is to expand providers from 130,000 to 1.8 million.
“For the millions of Americans battling substance use disorder, having access to proven, affordable treatment can mean the difference between life and death,” Tonko said in a statement.
“Passing the MAT Act into law last Congress was a crucial step forward in our country’s battle against opioid addiction and substance use disorder,” Turner added.
Tonko also introduced the BUPE for Recovery Act, legislation that would require the Drug Enforcement Administration administrator to temporarily exempt buprenorphine from the Suspicious Orders Report System, or SORS, for the remainder of the opioid public health emergency.
The congressmen sent 38 letters to healthcare providers nationwide, including to UnitedHealth Group, The Cigna Group, Kaiser Permanente, Elevance Health, Centene Corporation, Blue Cross and Blue Shield, CVS Health/Aetna, Molina Healthcare, Health Care Services Corporation, Highmark Health, Humana, and others. See the full list here.
Please Submit Data to NABH’s Denial-of-Care Portal
We urge all NABH members to join those already submitting data to our Denial-of-Care Portal.
We are beginning to use aggregated portal data to illustrate and compare prior authorization practices for commercial, Medicare Advantage, and Medicaid managed care denials.
Policymakers have expressed particular interest in our aggregate estimate on days of uncompensated charity care, as well as the length of delayed health plan responses to prior-authorization requests.
To support this advocacy push, we strongly encourage all NABH members to submit data to the portal. Please contact NABH Associate Manager for Congressional Affair Emily Wilkins with questions about the data metrics that we are collecting and/or the data-submission process.
Fact of the Week
A large, multicenter cohort study found that prescription of GLP1R in adolescents with obesity was associated with decreased risk for suicidal ideation, according to an article in JAMA Pediatrics.
NABH will host its Fall 2024 Board of Trustees Meeting in Nashville next Friday, Oct. 25 and will not publish CEO Update. CEO will resume on Friday, Nov. 1.
For questions or comments about this CEO Update, please contact Jessica Zigmond.