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ABOUT US
The Bluegrass Alliance for Behavioral Health is on a mission to truly hear the voices of families throughout Kentucky and understand the challenges they face in accessing behavioral health services for their children. In today’s world, getting timely diagnosis and treatment for children's mental health issues can feel like an uphill battle. That’s why we’re taking a grassroots approach—gathering firsthand insights directly from communities across the state instead of relying solely on statistics from healthcare companies and Medicaid.
Our goal? To advocate for real, effective solutions. We’re teaming up with lawmakers, healthcare providers, Medicaid, professional associations, and other key players to break down barriers and ensure every child receives the prompt diagnosis and essential therapy they deserve. Together, we can make a difference!
ABOUT OUR CHIEF ADVOCATE AND CHAIRMAN
About our Chief Advocate and Chairman, T.J. Couey
I’ve been directly involved in ABA and behavior health policy for a little over 14 years as a clinic owner and operator. In 2025, we created the Bluegrass Alliance for Behavior Health to formalize our ability to act as advocates in a structured, compliant capacity on behalf of children who are unable to access timely diagnosis and treatment in Kentucky. This platform allows us to support families by filing regulatory-compliant appeals and grievances when access to care is unavailable in their region—processes many families are never informed exist or do not have the capacity to navigate on their own. This work is particularly critical in Kentucky, where approximately 47% of children are covered by Medicaid and the state is largely rural, making network adequacy failures and access gaps especially acute. The Alliance exists to ensure those access barriers are documented, escalated, and addressed in a way that aligns with applicable state and federal requirements, rather than remaining isolated family-level struggles.
I’ve been deeply involved in provider and family advocacy for years. In September 2025, I was honored to receive the 2025 Provider Advocate of the Year award at the Autism Law Summit, specifically for work related to elevating and addressing systemic issues providers face—particularly Medicaid denials, access barriers, and noncompliance that directly impact children and families. That recognition reflected collaborative, multi-year efforts with providers, families, regulators, and policymakers across the country to move these issues out of individual clinics and into spaces where they can be addressed.
Until December 2025, I also served as Chairman of ABA Advocates, the Kentucky trade association for ABA providers who work to affect public policy to ensure access to care. I stepped down at the end of my term as part of a planned leadership transition. The organization now has a professional Executive Director, Shannon O’Conner, who is exceptionally talented and brings a thoughtful, effective, and values-driven vision to the work. I’m confident the organization is in very strong hands and that this transition positions it to advance our shared goals with even greater impact and grace.
Over the past three years in particular, I’ve intentionally focused on educating myself in the statutory, regulatory, and contractual frameworks that govern mental health and developmental disability access to care. This has included how network adequacy is defined and measured, how Medicaid managed care organizations and state agencies are required to ensure timely access to diagnosis and medically necessary treatment, and where those obligations break down in real-world implementation. As part of that work, I developed a model using publicly available Medicaid and provider data to measure network adequacy and demonstrate where payers are not meeting their regulatory requirements. That model has since been used to support advocacy efforts and policy discussions in multiple states across the country. This work directly informs how we approach denials, appeals, grievances, and escalation when children cannot reasonably access the services they are entitled to receive.
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Most of my work has happened behind the scenes—inside clinics through consultative engagements, through public policy, in regulatory initiatives, and alongside families navigating real-world denials and delays. With the momentum we’re seeing in Kentucky through family-centered solutions that are producing tangible results, it felt like the right time to start sharing what is working, especially if it can help other providers avoid unnecessary barriers and reinventing the wheel.
I’ve had the opportunity to present on multiple occasions to national audiences through the Autism Law Summit and the Council for Autism Service Providers. The breadth and depth of experience I’ve accumulated over the years comes from sustained, hands-on work at the intersection of clinical operations, payer policy, advocacy, and real-world access barriers. My goal in sharing this work—and in offering this webinar—is simple: to use that experience to help families and providers navigate systems that are often opaque, and to help children get timely access to the care they need.