The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) www.samhsa.gov within HHS released their Strategic Plan for FY 2015-2018 titled “Leading Change 2.0: Advancing the Behavioral Health of the Nation” http://store.samhsa.gov/shin/content//PEP14-LEADCHANGE2/PEP14-LEADCHANGE2.pdf.
In partnership with the Office of the National Coordinator www.healthit.gov, SAMHSA is planning over the next four years to expand their focus on health systems integration to treat people with mental illness and substance use disorders. The plan lists six strategic initiatives that includes future plans on how health information technology will play a major role.
The Strategic Plan’s goal is also to ensure that the behavioral health system includes states, community providers, patients, and prevention specialists that will fully participate in the adoption of health IT. This includes the use of interoperable EHRs and other electronic training, assessment, treatment, monitoring, and recovery support tools.
Disparities in the adoption rates of EHRs and health IT among behavioral health care providers as compared to the general healthcare sector is significant. This disparity partially results from the ineligibility of the majority of behavioral health providers for Meaningful Use EHR incentives. However, even among psychiatrists who are eligible for the incentives, EHR adoption rates are significantly below other physician specialties.
SAMSHA plans to bridge this gap and provide grant funds to support health IT adoption, provide technical assistance and training, address privacy concerns associated with health IT, and develop and adopt interoperable technologies to enable care coordination across healthcare providers as well as social service providers.
One of the goals is to increase the number of HIEs that incorporate substance abuse and mental health treatment data by 25 percent. The agency plans to work with state authorities and health IT coordinators to promote coordination of federal and state-funded health IT initiatives within the behavioral health community.
Another health IT objective is to support the development of data and technology standards related to behavioral healthcare prevention, treatment, and recovery. In addition, the agency intends to support health IT analytic tools to enable providers and consumers to use data at the point of care. SAMHSA’s goal is to increase the percentage of behavioral health providers using data analytics to inform patient care by 15 percent.
SAMHSA intends to not only support EHRs but wants to increase the percentage of their grantees that provide clinical services using certified EHRs by ten percent. Also, SAMHSA strongly supports the use of telehealth, mobile health tools, mobile apps, and patient portals to provide information to the behavioral health community along with the use of patient-generated health data.
In addition to the Strategic Plan development, SAMHSA initiated their “Open Behavioral Health Information Technology Architecture (OBHITA)” project www.obhita.org to develop three specific health IT tools. One health IT tool is called “Consent2Share”, a data consent management tool to support information exchange in compliance with health information privacy and confidentiality regulations.
Another tool called the “Patient Reported Outcomes Center (PRO-Center)” is a modular web service that captures and scores patient screenings, assessments, and other questionnaires and then integrates the data into existing EHRs.
The third tool is the development of the “American Society for Addiction Medicine (ASAM) Software” which is a modular web service for delivering ASAM’s Patient Placement Criteria that can be integrated into existing EHRs.
To support the tools, the agency is working on a “Behavioral Health Information Technologies and Standards” project that has plans to pilot the implementation of these health IT tools in the behavioral health community.