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Magellan Health's Initiative to Help Fight Mental Illnesses

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Magellan Health, Inc. recently launched a free crisis-texting service to help people combat mental illness during the COVID-19 pandemic. A certified, licensed mental health clinician will be accessible to people for confidential mental health treatment.

Rationale Behind the Initiative

This is yet another initiative taken by Magellan Health to aid people during these uncertain times. People are trying to cope with various kinds of emotions such as fear, sadness and anger as a result of the coronavirus outbreak. Individuals across the nation are undergoing huge stress. They may also seek further information on other available resources like community-based support.

The company is a leader in managing the fastest-growing, most complex areas of health including behavioral health. It provides counselling on the same and support people all over the country. This initiative will likely help people combat mental health issues during such unprecedented crisis.

Earlier, the company’s behavioral and specialty healthcare segment expanded its telehealth services and made additional efforts to provide client assistance during the coronavirus pandemic.

Magellan Healthcare revised its operations to permit all credentialed and contracted behavioral health providers to conduct telehealth video sessions for all routine services and certain psychological testing, applied behavior analysis (ABA), intensive outpatient programs (IOP) and partial hospitalization program (PHP) services.

Providers are able to use a number of HHS OCR -approved platforms to perform their telehealth video sessions. Magellan is also allowing telephone-only sessions when a member has no access to a video platform. Per its last earnings call, it witnessed a significant change toward telehealth services in late March and April, which increased more than 20-fold, representing around half of total behavorial outpatient services in April.

These alternative approaches will ensure members that they get proper care in times of urgency.

The company’s Behavioral & Specialty Health unit contributed to 29% of its net revenues in the last reported quarter.

Zacks Rank and Price Performance

Shares of this Zacks Rank #3 (Hold) company have gained 8.5% in a year’s time, underperforming its industry’s growth of 11.7%. You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.

Other companies in the same space, such as Molina Healthcare, Inc. (MOH - Free Report) , Humana Inc. (HUM - Free Report) and Centene Corporation (CNC - Free Report) have also rallied 23%, 47% and 18.3% in the same time frame. While Molina currently carries a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy), both Humana and Centene carry the same Zacks Rank as Magellan Health at present.

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