Barriers to outpatient mental health services experienced by adult Medicaid recipients: a scoping review protocol.

objectiveThe objective of this scoping review is to summarize the evidence on barriers to outpatient mental health services experienced by Medicaid recipients.

introductionMedicaid recipients commonly face challenges in accessing outpatient mental health services. This scoping review will categorize existing evidence on barriers to outpatient mental health services experienced by adult Medicaid recipients and identify knowledge gaps that warrant further investigation. ELIGIBILITY CRITERIA: This review will consider studies that address barriers to outpatient mental health service access among the adult Medicaid population (18 years or older) in the United States. We will only consider services provided by mental health specialists. Since barriers to care may have evolved after the implementation of the Affordable Care Act in 2014, the search will be limited to studies that use data from January 1, 2014, onward.

methodsWe will search the databases MEDLINE (Ovid), Scopus, and Embase, as well as gray literature and key organizational websites. Study screening will occur in 2 stages: i) titles and abstracts will be screened for key text words, and ii) the full text of potentially relevant sources will be examined in detail against the eligibility criteria. Two reviewers will independently be involved in study selection, and unresolvable issues will be decided by a third reviewer. The review will map extracted data to the Barriers to Health Services Framework, which groups barriers into structural, provider-level, social, and patient-cost barriers. We will provide a narrative summary of our findings and present extracted data in a tabular format. REVIEW REGISTRATION: OSF https://osf.io/rbxmn.