Advancing Measurement-informed Care in Community Behavioral Health

A measurement-informed care (MIC) approach recognizes measurement as a vital, though not exclusive, factor informing behavioral health treatment decisions.

While regulators and payers expect behavioral health systems and clinicians to employ MIC, there are not widely accepted and agreed-upon measures to use. In response, the Center of Excellence for Integration Health Solutions (CoE-IHS) at the National Council for Wellbeing created this report to identify candidate measures that could advance MIC.

MIC should use a single curated set of measures to meet an organization’s clinical care and reporting needs. These measures should be reliable and valid tools used in conjunction with other sources of information (both qualitative and biometric) to make treatment decisions that support clinical progress and serve as indicators of accountability and efficiency of care.

This report proposes candidate measures for MIC and next steps toward achieving sustainable MIC in behavioral health, including ideas for implementation, advocacy and research.