Tricare and Mental Health: Providing the Benefit

Navy medicine has identified mental health as one of the major product areas in which it wants to develop a business strategy that supports the effective and efficient provision of these services to the military health system's beneficiaries. To develop this strategy, the Navy Bureau of Medicine has established a mental health product line executive panel. It's members include both medical and non-medical Navy and Marine Corps personnel, reflecting the Navy's diverse mental/behavioral health resources. Among the many tasks facing the panel is establishing a comprehensive baseline understanding of mental/behavioral health care services as they currently exist in the Navy and Marine Corps communities. Our purpose in this document is to provide an overview of the regional TRICARE mental health care delivery systems and to identify issues requiring further investigation, thought, and analysis during the course of the executive panel's proceedings. This annotated briefing represents the first in a series of research documents that we will be preparing for the working group during the next several months.