Medicare Accountable Care Organization Treatment of Serious Mental Illness: Associations Between Behavioral Health Integration Activities and Outcomes.

Objective: Characterize the association between Medicare Accountable Care Organizations' (ACOs) behavioral health integration capability and quality and utilization among adults with serious mental illness (SMI).

Background: Controlled research supports the efficacy of integrating physical and mental health care for adults with SMI, yet little is known about the organizations integrating care and associations between integration capability and quality.

Methods: We surveyed Medicare ACOs (2017-2018 National Survey of ACOs, response rate 69%) and linked responses to 2016-2017 fee-for-service Medicare claims for beneficiaries with SMI. We examined the cross-sectional association between ACO-reported integration capability (tertiles of a 14-item index) and 7 patient-level quality and utilization outcomes. We fit generalized linear models for each outcome as a function of ACO integration capability, adjusting for ACO and beneficiary characteristics.

Results: Study sample included 274,928 beneficiary years (199,910 unique beneficiaries) attributed to 265 Medicare ACOs. ACOs with high behavioral health integration capability (top-tertile) served more dual-eligible beneficiaries (67.8%) than bottom-tertile (63.7%) and middle-tertile ACOs (63.3%). Most beneficiaries received follow-up 30 days after mental health hospitalization and chronic disease monitoring-exceeding national quality benchmarks-but beneficiaries receiving care from top-tertile (vs bottom-tertile) ACOs were modestly less likely to receive follow-up [-2.17 percentage points (pp), P < 0.05], diabetes monitoring (-2.19 pp, P < 0.05), and cardiovascular disease monitoring (-6.07 pp, P < 0.05). Integration capability was not correlated with utilization.

Conclusions: ACOs serving adults with substantial physical and mental health needs were more likely to report comprehensive integration capability but were not yet meeting the primary care needs of many adults with SMI.