The Mental Health Care Plan you probably underuse, and the patients it changes

A Mental Health Care Plan unlocks ten Medicare-subsidised psychology sessions per calendar year for any patient who has a diagnosable mental disorder. Ten. Subsidised. Per year. And yet the average Australian GP drafts fewer than three of these plans annually.

Who actually qualifies

The bar is lower than most clinicians think. A diagnosable mental disorder under ICD-10 or DSM-5 — that's anxiety disorders, depression, adjustment disorder, eating disorders, ADHD, PTSD, OCD, and on. The patient does not need to be in crisis. They do not need to be on medication.

What they DO need: a documented diagnosis, identified goals, and the willingness to attend therapy. That's the entire eligibility test.

What stops GPs from drafting one

Time, mostly. A traditional MHCP draft is 30+ minutes of documentation — the formal mental state exam, the K10 score, the formulation, the management plan. Doing it inside a standard consult is hard unless you've already done the screening separately.

The pre-consult workflow

If the patient has completed a K10 in the patient app the night before, you walk into the consult with their score, their answers, and their risk band already in front of you. The MSE prompts auto-populate from the questionnaire. The plan formulation drafts itself. The 25-minute version of this consult becomes 8 minutes.

More importantly, the K10 catches the moderate-band patients who otherwise present as 'just feeling tired'. They don't volunteer that they're not sleeping. They don't bring up the panic attacks. But they'll tick yes on a screening question they were asked privately on their phone.

The 2710 review

Item 2710 ($82.20) is the review item. A patient should have a plan review at session 6 and session 10. Both 2710 claims sit inside the same year. That's another $164 of recurring revenue per patient — and it's the trigger for adjusting the plan based on how therapy is actually going.