Focus on Behavioral Health: Understanding Your Costs in an Evolving Payment Environment

The first webinar in the series provided a detailed review of the methodology behavioral health providers should use for allocating costs in a fee-for-service accounting environment (direct, indirect, and overhead), and an introduction to how “costing” will differ for in a value-based system. 

In the transition toward value-based payment, behavioral health providers must be able to accurately track, manage, and report their costs in new ways. But many face challenges in doing so because their accounting and other systems are not set up to capture cost data in a meaningful and flexible way. During this session, we provided insight into the ways your organization can set up its chart of accounts, practice management systems/electronic health records, and HR/payroll systems to facilitate an accurate understanding of cost.

In this session, we discussed how to identify and calculate costs in a value-based reimbursement environment. Beginning with a high-level overview of value-based reimbursement concepts, we described the methodologies for identifying costs related to care pathways and clinical outcomes, and provided examples that translate this effort into identifiable costs.

During the final webinar, we reviewed the key takeaways from the first three sessions and applied these concepts to several scenarios in which behavioral health providers seek to understand their costs in an evolving reimbursement environment. We focused on how to model costs related to these scenarios and emphasized the use of this information for decision-making, negotiating with payers and guiding programmatic change.