APA Quality Measurement Initiative Needs You to Help Test Measures

APA needs psychiatrists and other practicing behavioral health care specialists to contribute to a federally supported effort aimed at developing meaningful quality measures for behavioral health.

Last year, as part of a cooperative agreement with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), APA was awarded $5.38 million over three years to develop quality measures for behavioral health. The measures are intended for use by a wide range of health care professionals, including psychiatrists, social workers, other behavioral health professionals, and primary care providers who treat individuals with opioid use disorder, first-episode psychosis, and suicidality, among other psychiatric conditions.

The initiative is embarking on an important new stage in which preliminary measures will be tested by members of a PsychPRO Learning Collaborative. (PsychPRO is APA’s national mental health registry.) These preliminary measures focus on measurement-based care processes; Learning Collaborative members have agreed to integrate the quality measures and assessment tools into their outpatient practice. There is still time for interested APA members to join the Learning Collaborative and become involved in the development of measures by contacting Debbie Gibson, APA’s deputy director of mental health registries, at [email protected]; or Barbara Casanova, APA’s assistant project manager for PsychPRO, at [email protected].

The measure development team includes APA staff from the departments of Reimbursement Policy, Research, and the PsychPRO mental health registry in partnership with seasoned quality measure developers from the National Committee on Quality Assurance. Also consulting on the initiative are members of APA’s Committee on Quality and Performance Measurement, as well as the initiative’s volunteer technical expert panel (TEP).

The TEP is composed of psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, other advanced behavioral health professionals, and primary care providers. Given the importance of capturing the value of these measures to patients and family members, the initiative also includes a separate consumer/family panel (CFP). The CFP is composed of individuals with mental and/or substance use disorders, their family members, and representatives from mental health advocacy organizations.

Anna Ratzliff, M.D., Ph.D., and Jerry Halverson, M.D., co-chairs of the TEP, emphasized that measurement-based care quality measures developed under the initiative will not diminish the importance of the clinical expertise of the behavioral health care providers, but should support and enhance that expertise. However, it is essential to include as wide a variety of perspectives as possible in the development of quality measures. “Patients and providers want to know that the care administered yields positive health outcomes and is cost efficient for all stakeholders,” said Halverson.

“Behavioral health, as a clinical specialty across the different provider types, has not reached consensus on what constitutes patient-centered clinical or functional outcomes,” Ratzliff said. “Measurement-based care enables clinicians to collect quantifiable data at intermittent and clinically appropriate time frames. This can be a major resource when caring for their patients.” ■

Members can learn more about the quality measurement grant here. Additionally, at APA’s 2019 IPS: The Mental Health Services Conference in New York, the symposium “Meaningful Quality Measures: Using PsychPRO to Place Measure Development in the Hands of Providers” will be held on Thursday, October 3, from 1 p.m. to 2:30 p.m.