North Carolina receives $1 million grant for certified behavioral health care clinics

Earlier this month, North Carolina was one of 15 states chosen to receive a $1 million one-year planning grant for Certified Community Behavioral Health Clinics.

The grant comes from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, an agency within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and was authorized by the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act of 2022. 

The funding will provide resources for an application for the Medicaid CCBHC demonstration program. By July 2024, SAMHSA will choose 10 out of the 15 states for the program and other states will get a chance to join the program in 2026.

David DeVoursney, a division director at SAMHSA, said behavioral health clinics are part of a model meant to ensure everyone has access to quality, comprehensive behavioral health care. 

The North Carolina Department of Health and Human Service said in an email that CCBHCs are required to provide mental health services to children and adults and treatments for those with substance use disorders.

“It’s a game-changing model in terms of the access and comprehensiveness of the services that are provided,” DeVoursney said.

In an email from a spokesperson from the NCDHHS, the department said it will use the funds to develop certification, prospective payment and data collection systems for the CCBHCs and create an application for the Medicaid demonstration program over the next year. 

This four-year program includes Medicaid providing support and funding for states to implement the systems they created, expecting that the clinics will be self-sustaining by the end of the four years.

North Carolina has clinics already working on becoming CCBHCs, some of which were funded by a grant from the NCDHHS last year. One of the five clinics that received funding was SouthLight Healthcare in Raleigh. 

Kathryn Schley is SouthLight’s CCBHC senior director, overseeing the clinic's progress toward the CCBHC certification. 

CCBHCs are required to provide nine specific services, including treatment planning, diagnosis and risk assessment, outpatient behavioral health care, peer and family support and counseling services and psychiatric rehabilitation services.

Schley said one of the biggest differences between CCBHCs and traditional mental health clinics is the increased focus on the quality of care. She said the clinic has to meet over 150 quality metrics to be certified.

“A CCBHC is a model of care that’s designed to ensure that anybody who needs services has access to coordinated and comprehensive behavioral health care, regardless of their ability to pay and regardless of where they live,” she said.

Joe Yurchak is the CCBHC program director at Mountain Area Health Education Center in Asheville, N.C.

Yurchak said the Medicaid demonstration program will make CCBHCs more sustainable because the organizations won’t have to keep applying for grants every few years and hoping to get funding.

Transitioning to a CCBHC model has allowed Yurchak's organization to serve more people and provide true “whole-person care,” he said.

Yurchak said the “revolving door" of health care — when a person goes to a hospital for substance use and doesn't get the support they need — is problematic, but solvable.

“How do you stop the revolving door of that person going back to the hospital?” he said. “Taking care of the social determinants of health by starting with housing, making sure they have food, and making sure they can get to their doctor's appointments.” 

DeVoursney said SAMHSA is excited to see the national interest in this program but that, currently, there is no consistency in how individual states provide these services.

“This has the potential to create the community-based mental health and substance use disorder service system that we’ve been striving to create for 50 years in this country,” he said.

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