https://orcid.org/0009-0000-0826-6530
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Teagan Knapp Maguire, Seyeon Jang, Alice Shijia Yan, Jie Chen, Accountable Care Organizations, Mental Health, and Aging in the New Era of Digital Health, Public Policy & Aging Report, Volume 34, Issue 2, 2024, Pages 54–58, https://doi.org/10.1093/ppar/prae003
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The health care costs of those with mental illness are estimated to be 60%–75% higher than for those without (Lawrence and Kisely, 2010). In 2019, the United States had $18 billion in medical spending for older adults with mental health disorders (MHD) (AHRQ, 2022). Although older patients with MHD have greater health care needs, they often receive poorer quality of care and have worse clinical outcomes (Lawrence and Kisely, 2010). In addition, the COVID-19 pandemic significantly affected mental health care by highlighting inequities, exposing system deficiencies, focusing attention on how we care for older patient populations, and launching a new era of digital mental health (Panchal et al., 2023). Rates of MHD increased threefold among racial minority and low-income Medicare beneficiaries and twofold among White and high-income beneficiaries with the emergence of COVID-19, exacerbating existing disparities (McGinty, 2020).
One challenge is that the U.S. mental health care system commonly functions in isolation, which poses barriers to delivering comprehensive, whole-person care, especially for people with diverse social determinants of health and racial and ethnic backgrounds (Jacobson and Parmet, 2018). A population health approach that involves coordinated care and an integrated system, supported by public health system and community organizations, is essential to improving the triple aim of improving quality, increasing efficiency, and aligning expenditures with population health (Chen et al., 2016).
