This is based on my experience in the United States with employer-based group health insurance. Obamacare aka the Affordable Care Act required those types of insurers to cover more mental health services. As a result, they are keenly interested in funneling people into outpatient services instead of impatient, which is probably a good thing in the abstract.
Many of these employer-insurance people are on PPO-style plans, which are supposed to have big networks where you can see roughly any doctor you want, and don’t need a referral to go to a specialist. Those types of plans don’t have a lot of levers to influence the behavior of their insured clients to good health outcomes.
So that’s where the “depression questionnaire” comes in. The insurer can pay the primary care physician 15 or 30 dollars to ask a short series of easy questions to screen for a common behavioral health disorder that drives claims. Somebody published a paper that says that this short series of questions is effective at detecting depression (or whatever). Therefore, if we give everyone these questions, and get a few more people into outpatient therapy options than before, we’re both saving money and improving public health outcomes, right?
This is based on my experience in the United States with employer-based group health insurance. Obamacare aka the Affordable Care Act required those types of insurers to cover more mental health services. As a result, they are keenly interested in funneling people into outpatient services instead of impatient, which is probably a good thing in the abstract.
Many of these employer-insurance people are on PPO-style plans, which are supposed to have big networks where you can see roughly any doctor you want, and don’t need a referral to go to a specialist. Those types of plans don’t have a lot of levers to influence the behavior of their insured clients to good health outcomes.
So that’s where the “depression questionnaire” comes in. The insurer can pay the primary care physician 15 or 30 dollars to ask a short series of easy questions to screen for a common behavioral health disorder that drives claims. Somebody published a paper that says that this short series of questions is effective at detecting depression (or whatever). Therefore, if we give everyone these questions, and get a few more people into outpatient therapy options than before, we’re both saving money and improving public health outcomes, right?