Building a Better, Smarter, Healthier System
A webinar by Meena Seshamani, MD, PhD, Director, Office of Health Reform, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services; and Christopher D. Carroll, M.Sc., Director, Health Care Financing and Systems Integration, Office of Planning, Policy, and Innovation, SAMHSA. To view video webinar on SAMHSA’s website, click here.
“In the six years since the passage of the Affordable Care Act, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and our partners in states and communities have made historic progress to improve access to quality, affordable health care.
We are seeing this progress result in savings – $411 million in 2014 from the Medicare Accountable Care Organizations1; in improved quality – a 17% reduction in the incidence of patient harms such as hospital acquired infections from 2010-20142; and in improved information flow – including a commitment from the companies that provide 90% of electronic health records to US hospitals and health systems to increase information sharing while maintaining privacy3.
These efforts to reform the delivery system have also had a positive impact on spending. Since 2010, we’ve seen the rates of growth in health care costs slow to historic levels.
The behavioral health community has been an important partner in realizing those results. Delivery System Reform efforts at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), like the Health Care Innovation Award (HCIA) portfolio, have focused on serving populations with behavioral health needs. The HCIA projects related to behavioral health represent a total investment of over $66 million in behavioral health, including improvements in medication management and crisis management services.
At SAMHSA, the Certified Community Behavioral Health Clinics demonstration project aims to meet HHS’s goals to pay for what works, improve the way care is delivered, and create better access to information through the development of a prospective payment system to pay for comprehensive, high quality, coordinated community behavioral health services.
The HHS Office of Health Reform was pleased to partner with SAMHSA on a March webinar to discuss the progress we’ve made to improve the health care system and cutting edge reforms we expect will continue to propel us forward.
We look forward to working across the Department, and with our constituents, to transform the delivery system to meet our goals of paying for what works, improving the way care is delivered, and creating better access to health care information.”