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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Available Reports:
- Feasibility of Calculating Measures to Monitor Quality Performance of Behavioral Health Programs (calculating-measures-quality-performance)