NatCon 2026 was filled with meaningful dialogue and deep conversations around how we can leverage technology to bring more stability and resilience to community behavioral health care. Here are some of our biggest learnings:

• The H.R.1 / Medicaid cuts was a key focal point and the operating tension was palpable between community based organizations and payers. 
  
  • The payer panel was unusually candid. One provider on the panel said outright: "I fundamentally don't trust them [payers]. My career spans 15 years of failure. When it comes time to choose people or profits, it is always profits." They cited their experience with struggling to get a hold of their payer partners. The pushback from the panel was pragmatic, not defensive: One of the other panelists shared that if you can predict payers will maximize profit, you can build strategies around that. The clearer signal is the pivot many providers are making toward partnering with ACOs and care delivery organizations, and building their business cases for how they are improving clinical quality, health outcomes, and total cost of care. 
• The health outcomes conversation is moving from process to functional, especially in SUD.
  
  • Health plans are explicitly moving past "initiation, engagement, follow-up after hospitalization" type measures toward functional improvement: medication adherence, long-term continuation in recovery, relapse not treated as failure. The panel was also blunt that providers are doing huge amounts of work that doesn't get reimbursed (case management, digital engagement, bird-dogging) and the only way to monetize it is to tell a tight, narrow impact story, powered by strong data. A panelist specifically advocated for asking health plan partners to validate the data-driven narrative using their own claims data. "Don't cast too wide a net" came up explicitly as advice.
• CCBHC accreditation infrastructure is now functional and operationalized.
  
  • The SAMHSA panel confirmed that accrediting bodies (Joint Commission, NCQA, CARF, and Social Current/COA) have all built crosswalks aligning their existing standards to the six CCBHC core criteria, so providers don't have to duplicate documentation. This is a meaningful piece of infrastructure for any CCBHC scaling story. 
  • SAMHSA did share that they will be publicly seeking an RFI to solicit other accreditation bodies that could support community-based organizations to attain and maintain CCBHC designation.
• The workforce pipeline is the unsexy crisis nobody is solving fast enough. \
  
  • Across the conference, everybody acknowledged that workforce challenges and the workforce pipeline are real issues. Countless individuals acknowledged that having greater support from peers, community health workers, and other non-clinical staff is going to be a key lever to meet the large unmet care needs that we have as a country. 
  • The Kaiser Permanente approach was also extremely inventive. They have built a full program to help community members move through the full lifecycle of becoming and growing as a mental health professional. Their workforce program built around eight academic partners, internal supervision capacity, and union education funds, and is worth studying as a model. 
  • Kaiser is also pivoting their program from internal-hire-only to community scholarship, which is a meaningful shift in where workforce dollars are going to go. One topic of conversation included supporting Medicaid work requirements with KP's innovative approach to building the mental health workforce of the future.