How Can You Address Increasing Demand for Behavioral Health Services?

Heightened demand for behavioral health services has presented hospitals and health systems with challenges and opportunities to increase capacity, forge partnerships to deliver care to patients and caregivers, and leverage tools to assess their capabilities.

To explore these issues in greater detail, the AHA and AVIA each day this week are conducting a virtual, asynchronous panel discussion about how to address increasing demand for behavioral health.

Rebecca Chickey, senior director, behavioral health services at the AHA, along with Amanda DeMano, vice president at AVIA, are moderating a discussion through Friday on AVIA Connect driven by participants’ questions with answers provided by panelists from Avera Health, Montefiore, Vituity Healthcare and OpenBeds Inc.

The panel will address topics related to the challenges and opportunities around the heightened demand for behavioral health care, including how to:

• Increase capacity and access for behavioral health services.
• Deploy unique partnerships to deliver behavioral health services to both patients and caregivers.
• Leverage tools to assess your organization’s behavioral health capabilities and identify opportunities for digital innovation.

AHA members can access the discussion on AVIA Connect. Simply sign in and click “Follow” to join the conversation.

This event comes on the heels of a recent AHA-AVIA asynchronous panel discussion, “Preparing to Implement the Hospital Price Transparency Rule.” The rule requires hospitals to disclose their negotiated rates, in addition to other information, beginning in January.

AHA members can access the full discussion and review data from a member poll taken during the conversation. The discussion, led by Ariel Levin, AHA senior associate director of state issues, and Kathryn Austin, director of health care consumerism at AVIA, addressed issues such as:

• What is required of hospitals and health systems to post information on 300 “shoppable services” in a consumer-friendly way?
• What information must be disclosed in the Hospital Price Transparency Rule’s requirement to display information in a comprehensive machine-readable file for all items and services?
• What happens if hospitals and health systems can’t comply with the Hospital Price Transparency Rule?