The Certified Community Behavioral Health Center (CCBHC), a model of behavioral healthcare that has taken root nationwide, is valued by providers and clients for its ability to offer wraparound services in a centralized setting. But the COVID-19 pandemic has forced the behavioral health community, including CCBHCs, to adapt in the face of myriad new challenges.
Pioneering New Territory: Lessons Learned by CCBHCs in the COVID-19 Pandemic, a free, on-demand webinar from Qualifacts + Credible, takes an in-depth look at how CCBHCs were affected, the unique challenges they faced and the lessons they learned. This webinar aims to provide you with a basic understanding of how CCBHCs function and how they respond in times of crisis. Even if your organization is not a CCBHC, you will find valuable takeaways applicable to ongoing challenges.
You can read a few highlights from this timely and insightful webinar below, or fill out the form on this page to view the recording.
Webinar Topics:
- An overview of the CCBHC model
- CCBHC certification criteria
- CCBHCs and COVID-19
- CCBHC state options and opportunities
- Meet New York City’s CASES
- CASES and COVID-19’s challenges
- CASES and lessons learned
Delivery System Trends
- A confluence of forces is changing how behavioral health services are delivered:
- Increasing desire to better address health disparities
- Increasing need for behavioral healthcare due to COVID-19
- Increasing pressure on state budgets due to fallout from the pandemic
- Growing interest in value-based purchasing
- Growing awareness that insufficient access to behavioral health is a big problem
What States Want
States are searching for solutions that:
- Address the high healthcare spend attributable to people with mental illness or substance use disorders
– Allocate existing dollars more efficiently
– Engage people in treatment early and keep them from developing poor health outcomes
– Go beyond episodic crisis response to models that link people in crisis to a full care continuum
– Acknowledge and address the contributing role of social determinants of health
– Improve care integration and adequately address physical health conditions among people with behavioral health diagnoses - Reduce high levels of unmet need
– Bring people into care whose needs have long gone unmet
– Strengthen partnerships and referral relationships across social service systems
– Build capacity in the behavioral health system to respond to rising community need - Align with existing state initiatives
– Alternative payment methods (APMs)
– Waivers
CCBHCs: A New Model
CCBHCs are built on the concept that the way to expand and improve care is to pay for the activities that make those goals possible. That means:
- Establishing a national definition regarding scope of services, timeliness of access and more
- Standardized data and quality reporting
- A payment rate that covers the real cost of opening access to new patients and new services (this includes non-billable activities like outreach and care coordination)
CCBHCs’ Successes
After two years of operation, CCBHCs have demonstrated successes including:
- Increased hiring and recruitment
- Greater staff satisfaction and retention
- Redesigning care teams
- Improved access to care
- Launch of new service lines to meet community need
- Deploying outreach and chronic health management outside the four walls of the clinic
- Improved partnerships with schools, primary care, law enforcement and hospitals
- Outcome-driven treatment
The CCBHC Model’s Adaptiveness in a Pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought numerous challenges for CCBHCs. Here are just three examples of how this model has been able to have an impact on these challenges.
CHALLENGE: Major rise in mental health conditions and substance abuse disorders (SUD) as a result of the pandemic
CCBHC IMPACT: Increased staff capacity to meet increased demand, along with improved accessCHALLENGE: Rapid shift to telehealth technologies in response to social distancing guidelines
CCBHC IMPACT: Financial resources to support telehealth adoption (e.g., equipment, training)CHALLENGE: Staff furloughs and/or layoffs as revenues drop
CCBHC IMPACT: Encounter-based payment mitigates impact of reduced units of service
For more examples of the CCBHC model’s adaptiveness in a pandemic, as well as information about the lessons learned, please enjoy our free, on-demand webinar by filling out the form on this page.
WEBINAR PRESENTERS:
Program presenters are Rebecca Farley David, senior advisor, Public Policy & Special Initiatives, the National Council for Behavioral Health; Mary Givens, product manager of compliance, Qualifacts + Credible; Billy Green, MPA, CPME, CMOM, director, Practice Operations and Clinic Programs, CASES — The Center for Alternative Sentencing and Employment Services; and Lauren Roygardner, LMSW, Ph.D., evaluation director, CCBHC, CASES.