By Debbie Witchey

I had the privilege of serving on the original Action for Progress (A4P) Leadership Council during the coalition’s proof-of-concept phase in 2025. We worked to test what collaboration could look like in practice: aligning priorities, building trust across organizations, and demonstrating that this model could produce tangible outcomes. The proof-of-concept phase showed that this was a new way of working—and the Administration took notice of the policy priorities our coalition established.

That early momentum created the foundation for what the coalition has now become, as evidenced by the February 2 launch event at the National Press Club. What started as a small group of committed leaders is now a broader movement with clearer structure, stronger partnerships, and greater reach. The focus now is on execution at scale—delivering measurable outcomes and sustaining long-term impact.

Why This Coalition Matters

The challenges we’re addressing are too complex for any one organization to solve alone. At a time when progress can feel slow or fragmented, this coalition is a way to accelerate meaningful change across our broad behavioral health community.

Sound mind and body are the keys for prevention and resilience, but those will best occur when the quality of care being delivered is elevated and aligned to the need. Quality must extend from prevention to care and outcomes for those with serious mental illness, children with serious emotional disturbance, and those suffering from dependence and addiction. We must think comprehensively—from prevention to early identification and evidence-based treatments.

Quality as Our North Star

Quality measurement serves as the foundation for achieving these goals and represents why collaborative action through A4P is essential:

  • Identifies critical gaps in care, such as insufficient follow-up after residential treatment or underutilization of medication-assisted treatment for addiction
  • Ensures accountability and standardization by establishing objective benchmarks for evaluating provider performance across the system
  • Supports individualized patient care through outcome measures that inform treatment decisions and empower patients to track their own progress
  • Embraces recovery-oriented systems that assess holistic, person-centered outcomes—including quality of life and social functioning—beyond simple symptom reduction

Modern behavioral health quality measurement has evolved well beyond basic screening tools like the PHQ-9. True quality encompasses both process metrics and the outcomes those processes produce, giving us a complete picture of care effectiveness.

Our Collective Agenda

Through the A4P Leadership Council, we’re working together across organizations and perspectives to advance a unified quality framework that drives evidence-based practice. Data shows which interventions work best, promoting adoption of proven methods over anecdotal approaches.

Our shared priorities include:

  • Developing a unified measure set that brings consistency across the industry
  • Reducing administrative burden so providers can focus on patient care
  • Strengthening data infrastructure to support sophisticated analysis and quality improvement
  • Establishing the foundation for a payment model that rewards outcomes
  • Advancing evidence-based care across all modalities, including therapy, medications, precision psychiatry, and standardized care pathways

ABHW looks forward to working with other A4P partners as we address the work needed in data, policy, payment, and clinical care to collectively drive quality and outcomes across all provider types and domains of care in behavioral health.

–Debbie Witchey is President and CEO of the Association for Behavioral Health and Wellness.