Help Shape the Future of State Behavioral Health Data: Join NRI’s State Profiles Workgroups

Help Shape the Future of State Behavioral Health Data: Join NRI’s State Profiles Workgroups

The NRI’s State Profiles Project is led by a Steering Committee of senior SMHA leaders that meets each year to identify key areas for collection, analysis, and dissemination of information about other states.  This year’s Steering Committee identified 5 key areas for focus:

1. Behavioral Health Workforce Challenges & Strategies (Including Shortages, Staff Vacancies, and Salaries for Contracted Providers and Temporary Workforce, and use of peers and paraprofessionals)
2. Financing and SMHA Plans and Actions to Mitigate/Minimize the Impact of Federal Medicaid and ACA Changes (Such as Work Requirements, Recertification, Uncompensated Care at EDs)
3. Implementation of Behavioral Health Crisis Services
4. SMHA Organization, Policies, and Use of IT (including Planning, Communication between Providers, with Examples of Milestone-Based Funding for EHR Integration; Use of Artificial Intelligence, Behavioral Health Apps)
5. Housing for Individuals with Serious Mental Illness

NRI will be convening workgroups to help identify existing data sources and develop survey questions to address areas where no state-level data exists. The goal is to produce reports useful to state mental health agencies based on priorities selected by the Profiles Steering Committee.  If you are a state employee and would like to participate in the creation of the surveys used to collect data useful to the leaders of state mental health agencies, we invite you to send us an email expressing your interest in the following topics:

The workgroups will have at least two one-hour virtual meetings to guide this work. If you are interested in participating in one or more workgroups, please email [email protected] and indicate which of the workgroups you are interested in joining by November 4.