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Health care payments continue to evolve and shift away from fee‐for‐service payment systems that typically reward volume and move to value‐based payment (VBP) models that incentivize high‐quality, cost‐effective care. While this is happening more for physical health services, there's more uncertainty about the role of behavioral health. A new white paper aims to tackle that question with information about existing models that have been implemented along with recommendations for federal and state policymakers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intensive outpatient and partial hospitalization or day treatment programs can provide more intensive levels of care with multiple types of therapy, more frequent sessions with mental health professionals, and clinically informed care coordination and case management. This observation on residential treatment is included in a new white paper released this month by the National Association for Behavioral Healthcare (NABH). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Observing that the transition to the 988 National Suicide and Crisis Lifeline offers an opportunity to grow crisis response services along a continuum, the National Association of State Mental Health Program Directors (NASMHPD) and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) last month released a series of 10 technical assistance collaborative papers providing important resources for stakeholders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As Scott E. Hadland, M.D., senior author of a dramatic paper published last week in the New England Journal of Medicine puts it, drug use among adolescents is not getting more common — it's at its lowest in almost 50 years. But it's getting more deadly, due to fentanyl. In "The Overdose Crisis among U.S. Adolescents," by Hadland and lead author Joseph Friedman, Ph.D., the problem is laid out clearly: After guns and car crashes, overdose (OD) deaths are now the third leading cause of death among adolescents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A policy paper released this month by the American Association for the Treatment of Opioid Dependence (AATOD) focuses on some of the challenges facing opioid treatment programs (OTPs) today. For example, it cites an article published in the New England Journal of Medicine (July 5, 2018) by Michael Botticelli that promotes the idea of methadone being available in primary practice settings for the treatment of opioid use disorder (OUD) (see ADAW, July 16, 2018). "AATOD recommends that this proposal should only be considered after careful, conservative, and thoughtful evaluation," according to the policy paper. "As history and our policies have shown, we do not reject the public health model for increasing access to care for OUD, nor are we ignoring what has been learned about clinical standards of care to treat this illness. It is important to understand, however, the complexity of inducting a new patient into methadone maintenance treatment when developing policies for increasing access to medication assisted treatment." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There have been many calls for federal changes to address the opioid epidemic, but one from Beau Kilmer, senior policy researcher and director of the Drug Policy Research Center at the RAND Corporation, released last week is a particularly interesting distillation that doesn't omit pros and cons for each strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An over‐reliance on federal block grants and "one‐off" funding initiatives has left the addiction treatment system under‐resourced to respond to an addiction crisis that stands to be at least as deadly as COVID‐19 during the span of the Biden administration, a trio of prominent researchers argue in a newly released policy paper. The authors suggest that the new administration and Congress should prioritize efforts to build on what they consider the most impactful developments in improving access and quality in addiction treatment, such as Medicaid expansion and parity mandates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]