Improving the Quality of Mental Health Services

If the continuing COVID-19 pandemic has taught us anything, it’s the importance of improving mental healthcare services across the country. The pandemic has taken a toll on the nation’s mental health and increased demand for services.

Mental illnesses are common across the globe; however, the quality of mental health treatment hasn’t progressed at the same rate as physical conditions. Poor mental healthcare can contribute to unfavorable outcomes and keep people from reaching their full potential. By implementing concerted and systematic improvement measures, significant improvement of these outcomes is possible.

Mental Health: Strengthening Our Response

In 2012, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) implemented the Inpatient Psychiatric Facility Quality Reporting (IPFQR) Program to bring inpatient psychiatry to the same standards and scrutiny as general hospital care.

The program encourages facilities and clinicians to improve the quality of psychiatric inpatient care by making sure providers submit quality measure data to CMS annually.

If a facility refuses to participate in the program or doesn’t meet all the reporting requirements, their annual Medicare payment rate update will be reduced by 2 percent.

New Year, New IPFQR Program

Changes are coming this year for the IPFQR program, moving from aggregated results manually entered through the CMS website to a patient-level file submitted to the CMS website. This applies to data collected for the performance year 2022, which will be submitted in the summer of 2023.

The PINC AI^TM Quality Measures Reporter® (QMR) solution will aid users in the data collection practices as the tool is equipped to collect patient-level data.

QMR can help facilities satisfy these new requirements easily by submitting these patient-level files on their behalf, reducing the burden of manually entering aggregated values.

Additionally, facilities and clinicians can continue to access reporting capabilities, like trending performance over time at the hospital and physician level, as well as measure information through the QMR reporting platform.

Why Quality Matters

All mental health services must provide high-quality care, and quality improvement mechanisms ensure that all available resources are used effectively. A quality-oriented approach ensures that the most up-to-date scientific knowledge and new technologies are used for care.

There’s already a negative stigma attached to receiving mental healthcare. This only widens the gap between people who have mental illnesses and those who actually receive treatment. A person’s trust in mental health treatment grows because of high-quality services, and as a result, they are more inclined to seek the support they need.

Health system performance measurement and reporting is a move that promotes accountability and transparency in health services. It helps build a greater understanding among people that mental health is essential to overall health.

Learn more about how you can complete regulatory reporting requirements with Quality Measures Reporter.

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