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NMBHPA Plan presented to Gubernatorial Candidates

The following comments from the April 5 Gubernatorial Forum summarize the  NMBHPA’s plan for stabilizing the New Mexico’s behavioral health system.

Gubernatorial Candidate Forum

April 5, 2018

New Mexico Behavioral Health Providers’ Association (NMBHPA) Maggie’s opening comments

Welcome to our candidate guests, and to everyone here and on Facebook.   Thank you for being here and supporting or issues.

NMBHPA was incorporated in 2014 as a non-profit professional trade association individuals and organizations that provide publicly funded behavioral health care in New Mexico.

The current behavioral health system has many positive features. However repeated disruptions and other destabilizing events have limited the potential of the system.   Some of these disruptions have included system restructuring every 4 years for the past 20 years, multiple agency closures due to allegations of Medicaid Fraud, significant work force shortages, and inadequate reimbursements

To address the effect of these disruptions, NMBHPA strongly supports the following plan to stabilize behavioral health system

  1. Improve access to care in all areas of the State including prevention, peer support, and community-based services
  2. Allow flexible funding and flexibility in providing services through reasonable regulation.
  3. Reduce administrative burden and paperwork by seeking alignment of service, documentation and billing requirements
  4. Support a strong provider network by including provider representatives in system level, design, policy development and decision making
  5. Support provider fiscal viability.
  6. Have a system wide shared vision of outcomes

We look forward to partnering with the new Governor to achieve positive change for New Mexico, and again…..  Thank you for being here and Welcome.

Functional Family Therapy Training for 60 therapists available

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Tim Ozechowki, Ph.D., of the Oregon Research Institute, Center for Family and Adolescent Research presented  to NMBHPA members on 8/21/2017 regarding a training opportunity for therapists to learn an evidence-based family treatment model known as Functional Family Therapy .   The training is free, funded by a grant from NIH to Dr. Holly Waldron who is the director of an FFT training and dissemination organization called Leading Implementations in Functional Family Therapy (LIFFT).  The project is seeking 60 therapists in New Mexico with internet access to participate in the training.  The centerpiece of the training is  weekly clinical supervision based on audio-recorded FFT sessions from each therapists’ active caseload. FFT sessions are uploaded to LIFFT’s web-based portal using a secure transmission. Dr. Waldron will uploaded FFT sessions and provide clinical supervision with individual therapists via phone or web-based teleconference.  After initial training,  the therapists will implement FFT with at least one adolescent client family.  After initial supervised training, therapists will use FFT with family therapy clients and continue to receive FFT supervision until receiving FFT certification. (Note that this project is not the same as previous mid-2000s FFT project, which was  implemented by a different organization.)
  •  Population?   No clinical constraints others than outpatient treatment model,. adolescents ages 12-18 generally.
  •  How much time invoked?   90 minutes a week + to begin with.
  • How is treatment reimbursed?    There is a Medicaid code to cover family therapy.
  • Provided in office vis a vis community???  Generally office, but mostly based on community standard, both will work.
  •  What is incentive to providers to learn a new modality?   Evidence based model, protocols will also contain instruments for clinical outcome…documentation of effectiveness, fidelity, ongoing clinical support, streamlining documentation using LIFFT’s online casenote and other documentation tools.
 For more information about signing up, contact Tim Ozechowski (tozechowski@ori.org) or Aleah Montano (Aleah@ori.org).

 

 

tozechowski@ori.org