Numbers Game
While nearly all larger employers, 97 percent, offer some mental health benefits as part of their employee health plans, a new survey from mental health coalition Path Forward found there is still a ways to go when it comes to making sure those benefits are actually useful to workers.
“Employers spend billions on their benefits. By investing just a fraction more on reporting and accountability, they can safeguard their investments and ensure every dollar spent translates into care delivered,” Anna Bobb, the executive director of the Path Forward coalition, tells me.
Employer Mental Health Survey
The survey, conducted by nonpartisan research nonprofit Employee Benefit Research Institute, asked people with decision-making power over benefits at 400 companies with 500 or more employees about their approach to mental health benefits. The fresh data can give executives a road map of how to improve, the organization argues.
→ The data: Only 22 percent of employers reported monitoring whether employees are actively using their behavioral health benefits and fewer than half of them evaluated whether the benefits were useful, accessible or cost-effective for their employees.
| “When employees use their benefit, they get help when the mental health condition is earlier in its trajectory, easier to treat and more likely to yield a positive outcome.”Anna Bobb, executive director of Path Forward. |
“When employees use their benefit, they get help when the mental health condition is earlier in its trajectory, easier to treat and more likely to yield a positive outcome,” Bobb said.
Concerns about privacy is a barrier, employers say:
To assuage privacy concerns, Bobb says employers can gather claims data where the identifying information has been stripped out.
Why it matters: “Poor mental health in the work force is widely understood to result in lower productivity, higher turnover, and higher health care costs for employers,” the organization said. Roughly 165 million Americans receive health insurance through their work — making decisions by employers especially consequential.
→ But what’s covered can be sparse: While more than 70 percent of employersreported offering coverage for therapy or counseling, only 33 percent had coverage for long-term mental health treatment.
“The reason to encourage utilization is to flip the switch on mental health care. For too long, mental illness has been stigmatized and pushed into the shadows. Employers can bring mental health care into the light and make seeking mental health care as positive as going to the gym,” Bobb told me.
The Path Forward coalition’s members include health care purchasers, clinician associations, health systems, philanthropists and health care nonprofits. It aims to increase access to mental health care and substance abuse treatment.