Working with the Maryland Parity Coalition, the MPS has advocated for changes to Maryland’s Network Adequacy requirements that would result in improved access to behavioral health care for patients with private health insurance.  The MPS joined several other coalition organizations in supporting the extensive comments submitted by the Legal Action Center.  The proposed revisions are summarized as follows:
• Inclusion of additional MH and SUD providers and facilities that must be tracked under the geographical distance metric;
• Heightened standards for the inclusion of essential community providers of MH and SUD services;
• Greater granularity in appointment wait time reporting for MH and SUD urgent and non-urgent services;
• New data reporting requirements that include reporting the number of providers by Board specialty, out-of-network costs to members when a network provider is not available, zip-code level impact for failure to meet geographical distance requirements, and consumer and provider survey data for appointment wait time compliance; and
• Mandatory submission of waiver information if a carrier fails to meet one or more metric.