Telepsychiatry as a Solution for CCBHCs

After Congress passed The Excellence in Mental Health and Addiction Act in 2018, this made clinics across the country eligible to apply for CCBHC Expansion grants, creating an exciting opportunity for organizations to increase access to care. Many leaders are looking for additional ways to ensure that their organizations are able to meet the standards outlined to achieve the CCBHC certification. At innovaTel Telepsychiatry, we believe that telepsychiatry can be used as an innovative workforce development solution to help your organization achieve CCBHC goals specific to patient access.

Why Should an Organization Consider Becoming a CCBHC?

Certified Community Behavioral Health Clinics (CCBHCs) were created to provide a comprehensive range of mental health and substance use disorder services to vulnerable individuals. In return, CCBHCs receive an enhanced Medicaid reimbursement rate based on their anticipated costs of expanding services to meet the needs of these complex populations. CCBHCs are non-profit organizations or units of a local government behavioral health authority and they must meet a number of requirements to retain their status as a CCBHC. 

CCBHCs have the opportunity to apply for expansion grants to further the reach of these effective and efficient organizations. As a CCBHC, you have opportunities to leverage funds you’ve never had before for resources including telehealth.

CCBHC Requirements

Becoming a CCBHC comes with benefits that allow organizations to increase access to care and improve the health of their communities; however, organizations have to meet several requirements in order to maintain their status as a CCBHC. 

The Six Domains of CCBHC Criteria:

• Organizational Authority 
• Staffing 
• Access to Care
• Scope of Services 
• Care Coordination
• Quality Reporting

There are a variety of ways CCBHCs can meet these requirements, including establishing partnerships that will help them achieve requirements with staffing, service offering and timely access to care, and more.

How innovaTel Telepsychiatry Can Help You Meet CCHBC Requirements

As a CCBHC, your desire to provide care for your patients is unwavering. Your ability to do it, though, is sometimes a struggle. Most of that struggle is tied to access, recruitment, and retention challenges that a partnership with innovaTel can help solve. 

innovaTel has a background in community mental health and understands the unique challenges that organizations face and is partnering with CCBHCs throughout the country and helping them meet and sustain the CCBHC requirements.

By utilizing innovaTel’s team of highly qualified, remote-based providers, you’ll be able to deliver care to the patients at your clinic who need it, now.

With innovaTel’s partnership, you can:

• Grow your clinical team without geographic restrictions
• Alleviate pressure on your staff
• Reduce wait times for appointments
• Increase scheduling flexibility
• Meet the growing demand for care many clinics are experiencing. 

innovaTel’s remote clinical team is made up of experienced psychiatrists, psychiatric nurse practitioners, and licensed clinical social workers. innovaTel can even provide a psychiatrist that serves as a Medical Director, one of the CCBHC requirements.

innovaTel’s telepsychiatry model can help you manage the changing needs of your clinic by giving you access to providers, within your existing systems for standardization of workflows.

• innovaTel providers document concurrently in your electronic medical record.
• innovaTel providers will work in your telehealth platform of choice, if you do not have one, innovaTel will cover the cost of one for our providers to connect with your patients.
• innovaTel providers become credentialed with your payers and your organization bills for their services.

Learn More About Telepsychiatry

If your organization is interested in becoming a CCBHC or is a CCBHC and is interested in growing your clinical staff through the use of telepsychiatry, we encourage you to contact one of our telepsychiatry experts today. Additionally, this year innovaTel presented a webinar in partnership with the National Council for Behavioral Health regarding solutions for CCBHCs; which is an excellent resource for organizations interested in CCBHC requirements and solutions.