President's Column
AACP and the New Year
Is it me, or are things REALY happening
at an unprecedented, accelerating pace
in community psychiatry these days? In
our community mental health center in the
last 6 months we have had a JCAHO visit,
new billing codes, this week we go live
with a completely new Electronic Medical
Record (EMR) that includes scheduling, clinical care,
electronic prescribing AND billing (ie a lot to learn in one fell swoop). We incorporated (sort of) adaptation to the
new CPT codes and we are developing a strategy for DSM
5 training.
Maryland is ahead of many states in the development of
health exchanges, which will include mental health benefi
ts that are commercially based (i.e., inpatient and outpatient
services) for newly covered individuals. In Maryland,
Medicaid expansion benefi ts will include the full array of
Medicaid mental health rehabilitative benefits for those individuals - all of which is likely to result in more people at
the front door. We already have a great deal of diffi culty in
managing the demand side on our own front door. When
this expansion group has coverage, we anticipate an even
greater gap between request for services and actual first
visit.
Then there is a whole set of projects related to integrated
care that we are working on. This includes our working
with community psychiatry therapists being deployed to
local primary care clinic sites as well as participation in a
new state Medicaid program that supports health homes
for our seriously mentally ill consumers. That one starts
at the end of the summer; so I take that to mean we have
about a month to adopt the EMR, make a plan for DSM
5, reengineer our intake process and then commence planning
for the health home option.
This whole list of all these things are the kind of phenomena
that usually occur only once every ten years or
so, right now, they are convergent in the same short time
period. There must be some sort of astronomy term for a
series of usual cosmic events that occur unusually close
in time. Cataclysmic comes to my automatic-negativethought
mind; however, as we put on our "transformation agent" badges and CMHC warrior game face every day,
we are ever hoping for astronomical, immeasurably great
results. Fifty years from the birth of Community Mental
Health in the United States, we are continuing to adapt and
progress.
AACP members have been at the helm of American
community psychiatry since its inception. As we adapt
and move forward, we have many big ideas to consider
and anticipate. The process for this has been laid out in
a project we have called El-Futuro. Our beloved previous
president Hunter McQuiston has written extensively
about the AACP El-Futuro project which is a kind of organic
strategic planning process that we hope will shape
community psychiatry for the next decade. Over the next
year, in addition to El-Futuro, we hope to make revisions
to the many position papers AACP has crated over the past
decade, and to roll out a certifi cation examination and process
in community psychiatry. A paraphrase of our driving
mission is that AACP strives to equip psychiatrists to
adapt and progress in their jobs and roles as community
psychiatrists. Thank you for your membership in AACP
and I hope to be a good president for us and the consumers
we serve through our practice.
Anita Everett MD, DFAFA
Section Director
Community and General Psychitry
Johns Hopkins Bayveiw Medical Center