Andrew Dreyfus
speaker
86 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2020
last heard Nov 2020
Andrew Dreyfus’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Dr. Partly so, because many of our mental health clinicians are solo practitioners are in a small practice without much administrative support.
Dr. We wanted to try to kind of radically simplify their experience of working with a health plan, so the only paperwork they really had to provide is to send us a bill.
These changes resulted in adding about 2000 clinicians to our network over the past few years.
And we've seen a really significant uptake in mental health services by our members.
We saw over 2018, a 43% increase in the care our members were seeking.
And that did increase spending, but we also saw a 40% reduction in spending outside of the network.
And that seemed to be another positive development.
At the same time, we were working on the addiction side, too.
We dropped co-pays for things like methadone and Narcan, and we eliminated prior authorization for suboxone treatment.
We really believe that reducing the barriers to access to care for both mental health and substance use disorder is not just the right thing to do, but it actually may reduce overall medical spending.
But despite some of the positive things we've done, it wasn't enough, and we knew there were still gaps in the system.
So about a year ago, and this is pre-COVID, I assembled our mental health team and other reimbursement leaders in the company said, what more can we do?
And one of the big gaps we knew was that a lot of kids in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts weren't getting access to child psychiatry services, or at least not access to care that would be paid for by insurance.
And many child psychiatrists were simply only accepting private pay for their services.
And so what we did is we dramatically increased, and this is a recent development, the fees that we're paying for child psychiatry services to, again, bring that back into the mainstream and not require families who are in much distress, if they're needing to consult a psychiatrist, have to hunt for a solution.
We started as some others have done during the COVID epidemic to pay for telemedicine visits for mental health at the same rate that we paid for in-office visits.
And we've announced that we're going to continue that indefinitely for the future.
And not just for telemedicine visits, but also for telephonic visits.
We're investing in a new company called Brightline that I hope you'll hear a lot about that is opening offices both in the San Francisco area and in the Boston area.
to provide coordinated, integrated services to families with mental health problems.
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