Successful Disease Management Programs Play Role in Health Care Reform
An eight-state study of the award-winning Behavioral Pharmacy Management Program (BPM) shows the private-public Medicaid partnership program has helped improve patient care while saving eight states almost $95 million in behavioral health pharmaceutical costs.¹
Lilly funds the program, which is designed and run by research firm Comprehensive NeuroScience, Inc. (CNS) at the sole direction and guidance of state Medicaid departments.
“Controlling health care costs and improving quality is a big, complicated issue. These kinds of partnerships, which pursue quality as a way to contain costs, are really going to be the solution to a lot of the health care problems that America faces,” said Joseph Parks, M.D., chief clinical officer and division director, Comprehensive Psychiatric Services, Missouri Department of Mental Health.
The study, conducted by CNS, evaluated eight representative state BPMs to determine behavioral pharmacy costs for Medicaid patients whose physicians received an educational mailing compared to costs for a similar group of patients who had not yet been a subject of a mailing. On average, the program helped states avoid almost $800 in behavioral health pharmaceutical costs each year, per patient, or a total of $94.5 million since the programs began for the eight states studied.¹
“These data document that it is possible to improve the care of people with psychiatric illness in a cost-efficient manner. The treatment of mental illness has advanced remarkably in recent years, but those advances are generally only slowly translated into better clinical practice. The BPM puts evi-dence-based best practice guidelines into clinicians' hands on a fast track,” said Jack Gorman, MD, SVP and chief scientific officer, CNS.
For state-by-state examples of the program’s patient care improvements and cost savings, click here.
¹Data provided by Comprehensive NeuroScience, Inc.
