Findings from National Center for Primary Care Broaden Understanding of Mental Health Diseases and Conditions (Creation of a Longitudinal Legal Data Set To Support Legal Epidemiology Studies of Mental Health Insurance): Mental Health Diseases and Conditions

2022 MAY 20 (NewsRx) -- By a News Reporter-Staff News Editor at Health Policy and Law Daily -- Data detailed on Mental Health Diseases and Conditions have been presented. According to news reporting out of Atlanta, Georgia, by NewsRx editors, research stated, “This article describes policy surveillance methodology used to track changes in the comprehensiveness of state mental health insurance laws over 23 years, resulting in a data set that supports legal epidemiology studies measuring effects of these laws on mental health outcomes. Structured policy surveillance methods, including a coding protocol, blind coding of laws in 10% of states, and consensus meetings, were used to track changes in state laws from 1997 through 2019-2020.”

Financial supporters for this research include Maternal and Child Health Field-Initiated Research Studies Program, Health Resources and Services Administration, U.S. Department of Health and Human Serv-ices (HHS), United States Department of Health & Human Services.

Our news journalists obtained a quote from the research from National Center for Primary Care, “The legal database Westlaw was used to identify relevant statutes. The legal coding instrument included six questions across four themes: parity, mandated coverage, definitions of mental health conditions, and enforcement-compliance. Points (range 0-7) were assigned to reflect the laws’ comprehensiveness and aid interpretation of changes Results: The search resulted in 147 coding time periods across 51 jurisdictions (50 states, District of Columbia). Intercoder consensus rates increased from 89% to 100% in the final round of blinded duplicate coding. Since 1997, average comprehensiveness scores increased from 1.31 to 3.82. In 1997, 41% of jurisdictions had a parity law, 28% mandated coverage, 31% defined mental health conditions, and 8% required state agency enforcement. In 2019-2020, 94% of jurisdictions had a parity law, 63% mandated coverage, 75% defined mental health conditions, and 29% required state enforcement efforts. Comprehensiveness of state mental health insurance laws increased from 1997 through 2019-2020.”

According to the news editors, the research concluded: “The State Mental Health Insurance Laws Dataset will enable evaluation research on effects of comprehensive legislation and cumulative impact.”

This research has been peer-reviewed.

For more information on this research see: Creation of a Longitudinal Legal Data Set To Support Legal Epidemiology Studies of Mental Health Insurance. Psychiatric Services, 2022;73(3):265-270. Psychiatric Services can be contacted at: Amer Psychiatric Publishing, Inc, 800 Maine Ave SW, Suite 900, Washington, DC 20024, USA.

Our news journalists report that additional information may be obtained by contacting Megan D. Douglas, Morehouse School of Medicine, National Center for Primary Care, Atlanta, GA 30310, United States. Additional authors for this research include Chaohua Li, Anne H. Gaglioti, Claire Bass, Teal Benevides and Vahe Heboyan.

The direct object identifier (DOI) for that additional information is: https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ps.202100019. This DOI is a link to an online electronic document that is either free or for purchase, and can be your direct source for a journal article and its citation.

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