Private Practice, Private Insurance, and Private Pay Mental Health Services: An Understudied Area in Implementation Science

The private practice setting is understudied. Private practice includes settings in which mental health providers are unaffiliated with healthcare and hospital systems. Private practices may accept insurance (private and sometimes public) or no insurance (private pay). Increasing attention to this setting is critical to facilitating equitable access to mental health services, especially given enduring mental health workforce shortages and service waitlists. Further, there have been recent federal government calls to increase mental health and physical healthcare parity and to reduce out-of-pocket patient costs. Implementation science theories, models, frameworks, and methods can help illuminate determinants of private practice service availability and quality (e.g., evidence-based intervention delivery with fidelity), guide evaluation of implementation outcomes such as cost and acceptability of interventions to patients, and identify strategies to mitigate barriers to high-quality, affordable private practice services. This article suggests research questions to begin filling the private practice research gap using an implementation determinants framework - the Consolidated Framework for Implementation Research (CFIR) 2.0. Research questions are proposed across CFIR domains: outer context (e.g., policies impacting whether private practices accept insurance); individuals involved (e.g., provider professional experiences; direct-to-consumer marketing impacts on evidence-based intervention demand); innovation characteristics (e.g., appropriateness for private practice); inner context (e.g., organizational characteristics); and implementation processes (e.g., innovation sustainability). The illustrative research questions aim to begin a conversation amongst researchers and funders. Bringing an implementation science lens to the private practice context has the potential to improve the quality and affordability of mental health care for many.