Establishing Massachusetts’ First Behavioral Health Telehealth Policy

Organization: MassHealth
Focus: Telehealth Policy Design
Challenge: Massachusetts lacked a Medicaid policy for behavioral health telehealth. Providers had no framework for billing or delivering virtual care.
Approach:
• Reviewed national Medicaid telehealth policies to inform model design
• Drafted state-specific policy language tailored to MassHealth structure
• Engaged behavioral health providers to ensure operational feasibility
• Built cross-agency consensus to support adoption
• Enabled over 1,000 providers to adopt telehealth pre-pandemic
Impact: Created foundational telehealth policy that supported continuity of behavioral health care across Massachusetts during and beyond the pandemic.