Authorizations

Key to CalMHSA’s vision is supporting counties in the many ways that lead to improved behavioral health. To that end, CalMHSA has developed a program that allows county clinical staff to dedicate more time to direct care by delegating the process of concurrent review and authorization for psychiatric inpatient hospital and psychiatric health facility (PHF) services. 

 Our contract with Kepro – now called Acentra Health – includes offering these services on behalf of participating county mental health plans: 

• Notification of admissions and requests for treatment authorization from all California psychiatric inpatient and PHFs that use a uniform process 
• Concurrent clinical documentation reviews to ensure medical necessity is met 
• Care coordination and discharge planning 
• Notices of denials and adjudication of appeals 
• Robust utilization reports 
• Internal quality assurance and inter-rater reliability reviews 
• Training and ongoing support to mental health plans and hospital providers for  Acentra’s electronic documentation review/submission portal 

 For more information about this service, please visit calmhsa.kepro.com or reach out to us at [email protected].