The National Council and its members have been fighting hard to have community behavioral health organizations included in the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, specifically the Health Information Technology Provisions that are in the bill. You in turn bombarded Congress with requests for inclusion in the grant section established by this legislation.
 
Working Together, We overcame these legislative issues!
 
The Senate included "Community Mental Health Centers -- as defined in Section 1913(b)(1) -- in the list of healthcare providers for the new grant program. This language has survived the Conference Committee.

We fought an uphill battle — achieving inclusion of health IT when many other healthcare groups fighting for the same outcome were unsuccessful — and we are grateful to all of our members that supported these efforts.
 
In this battle, we used the tools that are available to us, namely the definitions available in federal law. The complete list of health IT organizations in Section 1913(b)(1) includes: Community Mental Health Centers (organizations that meet CMHC criteria), child mental-health programs, psychosocial rehabilitation programs, mental health peer-support programs, and mental-health primary consumer-directed programs. Note that the current federal definitions of behavioral health information technology providers are not as inclusive as we would like and we are committed to improving and expanding existing definitions.
 
As healthcare reform moves forward, together, we will continue to fight for the needs of community-based mental health and addiction services in Congress and with the Administration. Let's savor our success of these legislative issues but remember that we have a long road ahead for health information technology.