Behavioral Health Tech’s Post

Transcript

We're here today, day one of the Behavioral Health Tech Conference, the Arizona Biltmore. I'm going to be on a panel talking about navigating the impact of regulations in substance use disorder treatment. We can't wait to get a captive audience to talk about what we love to do. So Nick Mercadante, founder and CEO of Pursue Care. We are a virtual clinic for substance use disorder treatment. We just had a shift in White House administration. That's, you know, going to impact policy in a lot of different areas. I think that that my big concern and the thing that keeps me up at night is can we remove some of the red tape and get there, you know, on a lot of these issues that are long standing ones that have gone through multiple, you know, election cycles and haven't been addressed. And I also look at criminality and how we treat our patients and people who use drugs and how that impacts access to care and the stigma around it. I'd love for each of you to share some of the key regulations from the past few years. That have been beneficial to the space. We got West Virginia and Kentucky to switch from Vivitrol to buprenorphine because of access issues and just follow the science and what medication works. And then additionally, Kentucky now allows somebody who is incarcerated to keep their Medicaid coverage so that when they leave, there's not a drop. We're not talking about high risk or high cost interventions. And we have to start trying to open the door with policies. Can reimbursement structures that allow for more preventive or early stage intervention. The the challenge from the pharmacy perspective is with the opioid settlements, increased risk and compliance pressure on the distributors. Patient choice is important. Like we can't and we don't want to tell every patient, sorry, we just can't get your script filled locally. So it's going to have to be shipped to you and you're going to have to be home and you got to sign for it. You know, those are the challenges of how we operate in our pharmacy and sometimes a patient. It's medication right then and there.