Kentucky and California are the latest states to join the federal government’s Medicaid mobile crisis intervention initiative.
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) announced the addition of Kentucky and California to the federal program on Thursday. The participants bring the number of states partnering with the federal government to provide community-based mobile crisis intervention units to six.
The American Rescue Plan Act, signed into law in 2021, appropriated $15 million in grants to help 20 states launch mobile crisis intervention units. Oregon landed the first CMS clearance to participate in September 2022.
“With these approvals, California and Kentucky join a growing number of states in helping connect people to qualified health professionals as the first point of care during a crisis,” CMS Administrator Chiquita Brooks-LaSure said in a news release. “This ensures people can get the care they need when and where they need it.”
Mobile crisis intervention units provide rapid response, individual assessment, and crisis de-escalation by trained behavioral health professionals and paraprofessionals. Other services include screenings and care coordination.
These units are meant to ease people through mental health or substance use disorder (SUD) crises and into the behavioral health care system.
The mobile crisis intervention units facilitate a “warm handoff” to other providers, referrals to ongoing support and check-ins.
The Kentucky state Medicaid plan amendment also calls for stabilization services to be delivered in the community following a crisis event, according to the release.
An analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation shows that as many as 39% of Medicaid enrollees have a severe mental illness (SMI) or SUD. That same analysis showed that 75% of states do not have core mental health crisis response services within their Medicaid programs.
“Everyone should have access to behavioral health support where they are, when they need it — especially those who are in crisis,” U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra said in the release.
Companies featured in this article:
