Report: Designing Children’s Behavioral Health Services in New York’s Medicaid Program

As New York State pursues its ambitious Medicaid reform initiatives in moving away from fee-for-service payments toward a system that supports care coordination and rewards value, it has an opportunity to opportunity to begin to begin building a high-performing system of care for children with behavioral health needs.

This report gives an overview of the complex structure of current services for children needing behavioral health services, and summarizes the needs of different special populations of children (e.g., children with serious emotional disturbances and children in foster care). It then reviews the State’s planned approach to reforming the current system, and explores several important policy considerations for stakeholders as the reforms move forward, in areas including modernization of the behavioral health workforce, new health information technology capacities, managed care arrangements between providers and plans, and quality measurement systems. Lastly, it presents a snapshot of behavioral health use by Medicaid-enrolled children statewide.

Click here for the report.