Your choices for mental health and addictions treatment could be severely limited by financial pressures very soon.
People search for therapists, and it can be a job to find one who fits. Neighborhood counseling centers are a great choice; delivering personal care. The counselor really knows you and spends time on your case. Many of these small businesses are in jeopardy because of today’s financial pressures and the requirement to implement an expensive, certified Electronic Health Record (EHR).
The EHR can make it possible to collect additional Medicaid incentives that help keep your therapist in business. The EHR is a major aid to increasing efficiency and quality in healthcare, and can help your neighborhood therapist serve more people with close, personal attention. This technology keeps your case information at their fingertips (safe and secure), and reduces energy placed on expensive financial and credentialing audits, then puts that human energy back into personalized service. In short, the EHR is a survival tool.
The health system is biased against Mental Health and Addictions, even with adoption of the HITECH Act that offers funding for the EHR, and other Acts that increase health insurance availability and force insurance companies to treat and pay mental health and addiction services equal to physical health conditions.
Good news arrived recently. Representatives Patrick Kennedy and Tim Murphy introduced a bill to congress extending HITECH funding for EHRs to many neighborhood counseling centers and other mental health and addictions treatment environments. The government money has been sitting there, unused, and this bill makes it available to more of these businesses.
Over the next couple years, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (Obama’s big money for health care) will offer “meaningful use” incentives for health care. With passage of the Kennedy/Murphy bill, and proof these mental health and addictions treatment centers use current, certified technology in their practice’s EHR, they earn more survival money from Medicaid incentives. If they can’t, they risk unprofitability and why have a business if you can’t make a profit?
Talk with your counselor about this. They probably don’t know about the funding that passage of the Health Information Technology Extension for Behavioral Health Services Act of 2010 would create. They may want to talk to their congressperson and senator about getting it passed.
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