Integrating Mental and Physical Health to Better Support Patients and Communities

Seventy years ago, George Brock Chisholm, M.D., the first director-general of the World Health Organization, famously stated that “without mental health there can be no true physical health.”

Those words continue to ring true today. May is Mental Health Awareness Month, and it is a time to raise awareness of and reduce the stigma surrounding behavioral health issues. It’s also a time to recognize how mental illness and addiction can affect all of us — patients, providers, families and our society at large.

Hospitals and health systems play an important role in the conversations we have around mental health care, including creating partnerships that address behavioral health issues in nontraditional ways. Many hospitals are creating new innovations around how behavioral health disorders are identified and treated — through the integration of physical and behavioral health services, changes in their emergency departments, and inpatient and outpatient settings. These strategies improve the overall value of health care and can lead to improvements in patient outcomes, quality of care and total costs.

Behavioral health remains a top priority for the AHA as it cuts across each pillar in our 2022-2024 Strategic Plan. During Mental Health Awareness Month and throughout the year, the AHA is engaged in a number of efforts to bolster support for behavioral health for individuals, care providers and communities.

Advocacy Efforts: We continue to work with Congress and federal agencies to implement policies to better integrate and coordinate behavioral health services with physical health services. Such policies include developing alternative payment models and bundled payments that incorporate behavioral and physical health services and financially supporting implementation of team-based care models. In addition, we are advocating to:

• Hold commercial health insurers accountable for covering behavioral health services in accordance with parity laws. 
• Enhance the behavioral health workforce by expanding the types of providers eligible for reimbursement and improving payment rates for behavioral health services. 
• Eliminate Medicare’s 190-day lifetime limit for inpatient behavioral psychiatric admissions. 
• Repeal the Medicaid Institutions for Mental Disease exclusion, which prohibits the use of federal Medicaid funds to cover inpatient mental health services for patients aged 21 to 64 in certain freestanding psychiatric facilities. 
• Increase targeted funding for facilities that provide pediatric mental health services and invest in the pediatric behavioral health workforce. 
• Reauthorize key programs in the SUPPORT for Patients and Communities Act, which would extend expiring payments, grants and other programs for substance use disorder. 
• Reauthorize the Dr. Lorna Breen Health Care Provider Protection Act through 2029 to provide grants to help health care organizations offer behavioral health services for front-line health care workers.

Resources for Hospitals: At the same time, the AHA continues to develop and share resources  that support mental and behavioral health as we lead efforts to:

• Increase hospitals and health systems’ integration of physical and behavioral health services in acute inpatient, emergency department and primary care. 
• Further initiatives by hospitals and health systems, community partners, social service agencies and others to expand access to a continuum of behavioral health services in a region. 
• Reduce stigma and suicides, fatal drug overdoses and alcohol-related diseases, while addressing the unique stigmas of specific age groups, cultures and other demographics. 
• Prevent suicide through behavioral health initiatives, awareness and intervention. 
• Support the mental health and well-being of the health care workforce.

Please visit our Mental Health Awareness Month webpage for more tools and resources as we continue our work to integrate physical and behavioral health, and advance health in America.