The Mental Health Parity Index helps expose gaps in how mental health and substance use disorder care are covered—compared to physical health care—across commercial health plans. Built on newly available Health Plan Transparency data, the Index enables insurers, employers, providers, consumers, and policymakers to identify where gaps in parity exist — and where action is most urgently needed.
The Kennedy Forum is a national leader in the mental health movement. The organization champions mental health as essential health, aligning stakeholders to advance policies and goals that affect systemic change. The Kennedy Forum launched the Mental Health Parity Index alongside founding strategic partners Third Horizon and the American Medical Association, with input and technical expertise from dozens of leading organizations and experts. The Kennedy Forum turned to InterKnowlogy to translate transparency data into a tool that brings mental health disparities into public view.
Even with the federal Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act in place since 2008, mental health and substance use disorder care coverage and access continues to lag behind physical health care — in network composition, reimbursement rates for providers, and costs to individuals. In Illinois alone, the Mental Health Parity Index found that outpatient mental health services are reimbursed 27% less on average than comparable physical health services for the health plans analysed.
The release of Health Plan Transparency data created a new opportunity to quantify these disparities. But the data itself was fragmented, highly technical, and difficult to interpret, making it inaccessible to most of the stakeholders who could use it to drive change.
“We knew that the raw transparency data held the potential to reveal systemic disparities, but it required deep analytical rigor to make it meaningful. The Index distils millions of data points into something stakeholders can trust, explore, and act on.”
Greg Williams, President, Third Horizon
To close the gap between data availability and data accessibility and bring mental health care disparities to light, The Kennedy Forum led a collaborative effort with:
Together, this partnership launched the Mental Health Parity Index, an interactive tool that allows users to explore where and how disparities in mental health coverage persist, including:
Built using InterKnowlogy’s Enterprise Insights platform, the tool surfaces key parity indicators in a format that makes it easy to explore coverage differences across geographies and plans.
Launched in May 2025 in Illinois, the Mental Health Parity Index became the first public tool to quantify parity at the individual health plan level using federal transparency data. It enables:
The Index is designed with scale in mind—offering a flexible, adaptable framework that can be replicated across states. The tool can expand nationally, enabling broader visibility and transformation throughout the health care system into an area that largely was opaque previously. It stands as a model for how policy, data, and technology can work together to create meaningful change.
