Supporting Reimbursement for Early Childhood Mental Health Services
Supporting Reimbursement for Early Childhood Mental Health Services
The Center of Excellence for Children’s Behavioral Health at the Georgia Health Policy Center (GHPC) is supporting policy and finance research to help state partners and clinicians provide mental health services in early childhood and to understand the costs and benefits of their implementation. One tool to support clinicians working with young children and their families is Zero to Three’s DC:0-5™ Diagnostic Classification of Mental Health Disorders of Infancy and Early Childhood which aids clinicians in diagnosing mental health and development disorders in young children using a systematic and multiaxial approach to diagnosis.
GHPC created a Georgia-specific tailoring of the diagnoses in this manual and cross-walked them with existing diagnostic ICD-10 billing codes, enabling providers to appropriately document and be reimbursed for providing behavioral health services for young children. The DC:0-5 manual and crosswalk have since been adopted by Georgia Medicaid. The center is also engaged in a cost-effectiveness analysis of Child-Parent Psychotherapy, an evidence-based family therapy for young children who have experienced trauma, to analyze the costs of implementation.