Feasibility of Calculating Measures to Monitor Quality Performance of Behavioral Health Programs
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Associated Project
Evaluation of the Certified Community Behavioral Health Clinic Demonstration
Prepared for:
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation
Key Findings
- Identifying individual behavioral health clinics in the Transformed Medicaid Statistical Information System Analytic Files (TAF) data likely requires state-specific approaches, which is extremely time intensive.
- Identifying individual clinics in the TAF data was largely not feasible for this analysis, but identifying the health care organizations under which clinics operate was feasible. This finding has broad, positive implications for monitoring and evaluating behavioral health programs that operate at the organization level.
- The process of identifying individual clinics may be easier for behavioral health programs where states are directly involved with the programs’ administration and/or monitoring, because states may have methods to track the clinics that are present in the TAF data.
- We strongly encourage states to create simple, straightforward methods of identifying their behavioral health clinics, and requiring clinics to use those IDs when billing Medicaid.
The calculation of behavioral health quality measures at the clinic level holds great promise for monitoring clinic performance over time, and for providing information for clinics to use to revise their processes and procedures to improve their performance. This report describes a novel process of testing the feasibility of using the Transformed Medicaid Statistical Information System Analytic Files data to calculate behavioral health quality measures at the clinic level. Results indicated that calculating reliable, valid behavioral health quality measures at the organization level was feasible for most organizations and years in all states included in this analysis, but that calculating clinic-level measures was not feasible in many cases. These findings highlight the potential utility of monitoring behavioral health organizations’ performance on quality measures over time and highlight the need for states to develop methods to identify behavioral health clinics in federal Medicaid data to enable these kinds of analyses to the clinic level as well.
This research was conducted under contract between HHS/ASPE’s Office of Behavioral Health, Disability, and Aging Policy (BHDAP) and Mathematica Policy Research. Additional research in this area is available at the ASPE Behavioral Health page
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