In 2023, we turned our focus to mental health. Why? Because mental health affects all of us. These statistics from the National Alliance on Mental Illness highlight the urgent need for better mental health care:
With numbers like these, it's easy to see how important it is to treat mental health as an integral part of health care.
Health care must include mental health care. Mental health is a state of mental well-being that enables people to cope with the stresses of life, realize their abilities, learn well and work well, and contribute to their community, according to the World Health Organization. A focus on mental health can make a significant societal impact on our employees, customers, and beneficiaries. Using mental health as a platform, we created a unified effort from all lines of business to energize our company and culture.
That’s why we worked to increase access to mental health care for employees, customers, and communities. Our efforts increased utilization of our Employee Assistance Program for better employee mental health, scaled up behavioral health services for commercial health insurance customers, and provided necessary support and resources to successfully deliver the Medicare Administrative Contract Challenge Grants earned by the WPS Government Health Administrators division in support of depression screening and chronic care management.
At WPS, we're committed to health equity. This means everyone should have a fair and just opportunity to attain their highest level of health. As we worked to remove economic, social, and access obstacles to health care, our goal was to drive systemic and policy changes.
We continue our efforts to evaluate parity between medical/surgical benefits and mental health/substance use disorder benefits, including comparative analysis of certain treatment limitations for its applicable group health plans to ensure it remains compliant and competitive within the health insurance industry.
