Financing Options to Screen for Social Determinants of Mental Health

In 2025, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the largest funder of mental health services in the United States, announced that it would remove measures assessing the social determinants of health (SDoH) from its quality reporting programs for inpatient psychiatric and inpatient rehabilitation facilities. Going forward, administrators and providers may not be financially reimbursed for screening patients and reporting these data, even though many SDoH are modifiable and account for half of the county-level variations in health outcomes. In this column, the authors argue for the continuation of the Inpatient Psychiatric Facility Quality Reporting Program and the Inpatient Rehabilitation Facility Patient Assessment Instrument and discuss alternative financing strategies for state agencies and commercial insurers to incentivize SDoH screening as federal reporting requirements end.