SCRC Public Talk 3/5/26: Suicide Care Billing & Financing Strategies with Drs. Comtois & Ratzliff

Описание: The need for better Suicide Care is ever present as is the need for clear pathways for billing those services. Organizations like SPRC and Zero Suicide have created tip sheets and guidance on how to finance Suicide Care. However, the landscape is changing - CMS recently created new billing codes (for safety planning and post-discharge) which have yet to be tried at a lot of sites. In the primary care setting, CMS has also developed Collaborative Care billing, but it isn't clear to many providers which codes to use when serving a patient experiencing suicidal thoughts or behavior.

As new interventions for suicide care are developed, it is critical to know how they will be integrated into the workflow and, particularly, how to bill them effectively. The Suicide Care Research Center has been co-designing a number of new interventions with clinicians and people and families with lived experience of suicidal thoughts or behavior. For them to be used, this has to be done with pragmatic issues like financing in mind.

In this talk, Drs. Ratzliff and Comtois presented existing financing options. They then applied these options by walking through two case scenarios based on new SCRC technology-based interventions and reviewed strategies for billing for these services in outpatient medical settings. This was then followed by a facilitated discussion.