Reimbursement of mental health providers basedon improvement of their patients’ care could reward insurers evenas the patients benefit.

According to Forbes, a move to value-based payments topsychiatrists and other providers may not just spur treatment to amore holistic model but also pay off in a big way for the insurersthat pay for care.

Former Congressman Patrick Kennedy is pushing for change in howmental health patients aretreated, and calling for the mental health industry to measureoutcomes just as the medical care system does. That way, he claims,lies the path to better treatment, but also financial reward.

Kennedy was quoted in the report saying, “The benefit in realhealth care reform is going to be in the mental health space.That’s where the gold is. It will be the way that insurancecompanies actually get the benefit of real health care reform.”

Because mental health treatment is“carved out” from medical benefits, and generally sold separatelyto insurance customers by insurers such as UnitedHealth Group,Anthem, Aetna, Humana, and Blue Cross and Blue Shield, that meansthat when treatment is improved, the improvement is not seen at thebottom line.

That’s despite the fact that many insurers are using contractswith accountable care organizations, which coordinates care andtakes other actions to improve the outcome for the patient andlower costs for the insurer.

Kennedy said in the report, “If you carve it out, it means youdon’t see the benefit on the books.”

But that could be changing: Cigna, for its part, is planning toevaluate an evidence-based approach to treatment for substanceabuse to see whether it can convert to a value-based paymentsystem, rather than the current fee-for-service model. Should itprove successful, Cigna and other insurers could then developguidelines that could be utilized in mental health providerprotocols.

In the report, Kennedy said, “It’s not in our culture to thinkof about this whole person health. But that is where the money is.The people who get their arms around it in the business world aregoing to be the people who make the biggest killing in terms ofhealth care.”