The Alaska Department of Health, Division of Behavioral Health (DBH) is planning to help three primary care provider organizations offer integrated mental health and addiction treatment services via the Collaborative Care Model (CoCM). The selected primary care provider organizations will be awarded grants of up to $270,000 each per year for a 4.5-year period to develop the staffing and systems needed to implement the CoCM.
CoCM focuses on defined consumer populations who are tracked in a registry to monitor treatment progression. The treatment plan focuses on measurement-based treatment to target and to ensure the consumer’s goals and clinical outcomes are met.
The state issued a request for proposals (RFP) with responses due by November 13, 2024. Total available funding is $810,000 per fiscal year, with an aggregate five-year total of $4.05 million in federal funding. For fiscal year 2025, DBH intends to award the full fiscal year amount to support start-up costs. The project period begins January 1, 2025, and runs through June 30, 2028.
Eligible primary care settings include family medicine, general internal medicine, general pediatrics, geriatrics and others that fulfill general health needs. The selected practices will be required to have a primary care provider champion, a behavioral health care manager, and a psychiatric consultant.
The grantees will be expected to serve the general primary care population, and each practice must select at least one special population to serve as part of their proposed project. The special populations are as follows:
- Adults with serious mental illness who have a co-occurring mental illness and physical health conditions or chronic disease
- Children and adolescents with a serious emotional disturbance who have a co-occurring physical health condition
- Individuals with addiction disorder
- Individuals with co-occurring mental illness and addiction disorder
The program has three broad goals:
- Implement the CoCM in primary care settings,
- Increase access to whole-person health by increasing capacity for primary care settings to identify and connect people to integrated physical and behavioral health care.
- Increase early detection and treatment of behavioral symptoms at primary care visits
The selected primary care practices will be expected to meet the following performance measures that will be tracked by the AIMs caseload tracker registry:
- 75% of consumers will be screened with the Patient Health Questionnaire 9 (PHQ-9) to improve diagnosis, monitoring, and tracking of depression symptoms and outcomes.
- 25% more appointments will be kept, which will be counted as evidence of consumer engagement and effectiveness of the CoCM.
- Consumer self-rating of their mental health functioning from the National Outcomes Measures section A1 will improve between initial, follow-up, and discharge.
To guide the implementation framework for the project and grantees, DBH will use The Advancing Integrated Mental Health Solutions (AIMS) Center resources at the University of Washington. The grantees will use the AIMS caseload tracker to serve as the consumer registry and to collect project data.
In August 2024, the state was awarded a federal grant of $1.8 million to support implementation of the CoCM. SAMHSA posted the notice of funding opportunity (NOFI SM-24-011) on March 19, with state applications due by May 22, 2024. On August 29, 2024, SAMHSA announced it had selected five states: Pennsylvania (awarded $809,177), New Jersey (awarded $900,000), Virginia (awarded $1,792,120), Tennessee (awarded $900,000), and Alaska (awarded $1,800,000.
For more information about the program, contact: Alex Huesman, Public Information Team, Alaska Department of Health, 3601 C Street, Suite 902, Anchorage, Alaska 99503; 907-312-8254; Email: alex.huseman@alaska.gov; Website: https://dhss.alaska.gov/
For more information about the RFP, contact: Lauren Mallery, Procurement, Division of Behavioral Health, Alaska Department of Health and Social Services, 350 Main Street, Juneau, Alaska 99801; 907-465-3026; Email: lauren.mallery@alaska.gov; Website: https://health.alaska.gov/dbh/Pages/default.aspx