The Mental and Behavioral Health Registry (MBRH) is a Qualified Clinical Data Registry (QCDR) approved by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) for use in reporting by Merit-Based Incentive Payment System (MIPS) eligible clinicians. Through a partnership with outside software vendor Healthmonix, the MBHR enables practitioners to track quality outcomes for their patients utilizing measures identified by the discipline as being the most meaningful to both practitioners and those they serve. Measure identification is being steered by an advisory committee of experts in the field of outcome measurement, psychotherapy, clinical research, and quality improvement.
For practitioners interested in participating in MIPS, the MBHR includes 97 standard MIPS measures and 11 mental and behavioral health measures unique to the MBHR that can be submitted directly to CMS. The MBHR is the only registry option that includes measures that enable professionals to screen for anxiety disorders and report anxiety disorder treatment response. It also includes measures on social role functioning, sleep quality, posttraumatic stress disorder, alcohol use, and ADHD, as well as a suite of quality process measures specifically for neuropsychology. This will give psychologists and other professionals who use the registry more flexibility in reporting patient-reported outcome measures in order to successfully participate in MIPS to receive increased reimbursement.
In addition to collecting patient-reported outcomes that can be used by therapists and patients to improve care (e.g., provide rapid feedback, allow for benchmarking), deidentified data could be made available to clinical scientists and researchers interested in studying psychotherapy outcomes, health disparities, therapist expertise, etc. The MBHR also provides participants with resources related to clinical practice guidelines, evidence-based practices, clinical decision-making tools, and continuing education opportunities. It can also meet psychologists’ other data needs, such as meeting board certification maintenance of competence requirements and negotiating with value-based reimbursement payment programs (i.e., pay-for-performance).