How Virtual Clinic Integrates Across Healthcare Organizations’ Unique Patient Journeys

 

Access to behavioral health care continues to be a significant challenge across the country, with  50% of behavioral health patients being treated in primary care   While primary care providers want to know more about behavioral health and help their patients, they don’t always have the time or specialized knowledge to treat complex cases.

Without dedicated providers or the ability to risk stratify or prioritize care, healthcare organizations may struggle to ensure patients receive the appropriate level of care in a timely manner.

For those healthcare organizations, a comprehensive, endlessly adaptable care model like Virtual Clinic can help a patient receive the holistic behavioral health care they need while seamlessly integrating across their care continuum.  

Virtual Clinic embeds behavioral health specialists into your healthcare organization  

The Virtual Clinic adapts to meet your organization’s needs and acts as an extension of your care team, integrating seamlessly across your healthcare organization. The goal of this care model is to connect patients with the right provider at the right time, ensuring the most in need are first in line. 

Here’s how it works: Once a patient is referred, a licensed social worker conducts an intake to determine the appropriate level of care, whether the patient requires a psychiatrist, therapist, or both. This process, along with medication management and consults, is documented within the electronic health record (EHR) — providing real-time data access for your team.

Additionally, after the intake appointment, the LCSW will schedule the patient’s next appointment.

 

 

Virtual Clinic providers are also available for consultations, working alongside your healthcare organization to stabilize patients and facilitate appropriate transition back to their primary care provider.

 

 

 

We help support your team and develop the pathways most meaningful to your patient population – whether they’re a new mother, an oncology patient, or pediatric patient.

Virtual Clinic gives your patients what they need, so they don’t seek care elsewhere

Economic feasibility and program scalability are essential to a healthcare organization’s approach to behavioral health. With Virtual Clinic, healthcare organizations only pay for patient encounters, aligning costs with utilization. Because of our commitment to quality and belief in this program, we deliver this model at risk to help ensure a scalable and sustainable solution for your healthcare organization.

“The benefit of having a quality management solution in place at your healthcare organization is the ability to look at a patient’s health outcomes across all specialties and see where there may be intersections between how specialties are working together and where opportunities to collaborate may lie.”
Yara Nielsenshultz, RN, MS, CPHQ, Executive Director of Quality

Additionally, with nearly 56% of Americans seeking mental health care and 74% expressing concerns about accessibility, offering behavioral health services can be a key differentiator for your healthcare organization. Wherever your focus is across the continuum, Virtual Clinic ensures patients can get the specialized care they need at your healthcare organization—eliminating the need to seek care elsewhere.

This holistic approach enhances patient retention and satisfaction, generating word-of-mouth referrals and broader promotion of your services.

Virtual Clinic leverages AI to help healthcare organizations prioritize which patients need care first

The Virtual Clinic model has been trained to test for false positive and negatives, leveraging a healthcare organization’s existing and incoming data sets. This approach considers which patients are at most risk for escalating towards suicidal ideation or towards care in the ED.

“A solution like Virtual Clinic ensures behavioral health care is always available throughout every patient journey – whether that’s in primary care or women’s health, patients will get the support they need in a timely manner.” – Andy Flanagan, Chief Executive Officer

Want to learn more from Andy? Click here to read his take on the impact of Virtual Clinic.

By analyzing existing data sets, Virtual Clinic can direct your team to the patients who need immediate attention, reducing wait times and improving outcomes.

When changes in a patient’s condition occur, their provider can consult with a Virtual Clinic specialist to discuss care adjustments, such as medication changes, further enhancing quality of care.

Want to learn more about how we’re leveraging AI? Check out our Iris Insights blog here.

Where Iris Telehealth fits in

Iris Telehealth’s Virtual Clinic offers an adaptable, integrated solution that augments your healthcare organization’s operations and capacity. Our program is designed to be financially sustainable while creating lasting positive outcomes for your patients.

Ready to learn more? Contact us today to see how Virtual Clinic can enhance both patient and provider satisfaction while mitigating risk.

How Iris Insights Leverages Data to Make Meaningful and Actionable Change for Health Systems

High demand for psychiatric care can create challenges across a health system and hinder their ability to meet key goals and KPIs.

Additionally, behavioral health visits can occupy 42% more time than non-psychiatric visits and result in 24% more inpatient admissions.

Fortunately, leveraging data tracking and optimization to make meaningful change across your organization can help you meet key goals, improve patient care, and gain clarity on what actions your care team needs to take to reach their desired outcomes.

Iris Insights adds intelligence to patient outreach and improves engagement

Typically, in behavioral health outreach, there’s no real concept of acuity beyond what a provider specifies as urgent.

That’s what makes risk stratification an important component of an organization’s approach to behavioral health care. Iris Insights reviews a wide variety of data elements and identifies patients who have a likelihood of escalation. Then, we can provide outreach and engage those patients at highest risk of admission first, before they escalate.

Early identification helps avoid escalation, reduces costs, and improves the success of a hospital’s behavioral health program.

To help improve the effectiveness of this approach, Iris Insights visualizes the data in an easy-to-use platform. This platform enables organizations to view all their metrics, KPIs, and reports – everything they need to make sure their program is performing at the level they need for the best results.

Achieving clarity into your program’s performance is essential for success

Iris Insights is a HIPAA-compliant, secure platform that serves as a singular place for organizations to gain visibility into their behavioral health programs. For example, through the platform they can see referral status or where a patient is in their behavioral health journey.

Here are a few things a health system might need to look at when assessing their programs success:

  • What are the margins across health payers?
  • How do our metrics compare to national and regional benchmarks?
  • How optimized are our resources to maximize margins while maintaining SLAs?

Having this visibility into current performance and how an organization is stacking up compared to other health systems like theirs can help optimize the success of their behavioral health strategy.

Success also takes shape in change management. When combining the Iris management model and our high-quality providers, we can help drive continuous clinical improvement. In fact, healthcare organizations that have leveraged our partnership have seen a 38% depression symptom improvement and an 80% ED throughput improvement.

Having visibility into how your behavioral health services are performing can help you optimize where needed and make sure your patients are getting what they need from their care.

Data can be a valuable tool that enriches the patient experience

According to the National Committee for Quality Assurance, quality measures are urgently needed to help guide value-based payment models to support high-quality, equitable, and coordinated care.

Typically, when a patient has a behavioral health visit, they’re given take-home instructions to help assist in their treatment. However, there’s no real insight or engagement to see how the patient is doing until their next visit.

This lack of insight can hinder the team’s ability to adjust or be more proactive or reactive in the patient’s treatment.

Dr. Michael Lambert, a psychology professor at Brigham Young University shared to the American Psychological Association (APA) that 85% of therapists believed their patients improved, but research showed that only 40-60% improved. Dr. Lambert also shared therapists believed 3% of their patients deteriorated when in actuality, 5-10% of adults worsened while in therapy.

That’s where measurement-based care can help organizations visualize their clinical and operational data to help identify gaps like these. When healthcare organizations leverage effective behavioral health assessments, utilize technologies, and provide efficient and regular outreach, patients stay more engaged in their treatment. At Iris, we work closely with our clinical leadership to ensure we’re implementing workflows that deliver a more holistic approach to care.

Data tells a story, and providers can view trends over time — well before a patient comes in for their 90-day evaluation.

Putting patient data at the provider’s fingertips helps complete the picture of where a patient is in their behavioral health journey and improves the quality of care.

Iris Insights provides supports for a traditionally underserved part of the continuum of care

Building out a quality program can be costly and consume a lot of resources. However, leveraging a quality partnership can bolster your program with clinical expertise, covering infrastructure costs, and providing scalable behavioral health services.

With a platform like Iris Insights, your data is actionable and can help your organization make the most of your behavioral health program.

Additionally, as a behavioral health focused company, we take a conservative approach to technologies like AI and leverage them to decrease the risk of escalation and ensure patients aren’t falling through care gaps.

If you’d like to learn more about Iris Insights and how it can help your organization stay on track to meet your key goals and metrics, please don’t hesitate to reach out today! You can contact us here for more information.

How a Tailored Virtual Clinic Model Expands Access to Behavioral Health Services for Healthcare Organizations 

Integrating behavioral health into existing patient journeys, whether a patient just received a cancer diagnosis, is an expecting mother, or is experiencing escalating anxiety at a primary care appointment, is the right thing to do – for the patient and for the organization.   

At Iris Telehealth, we work with healthcare organizations to tailor programs that seamlessly integrate into their existing service lines to address population-specific needs and acuity levels.  

This approach to augmenting and building a tailored behavioral health program is what we call creating a “Virtual Clinic,” as it represents a seamless, comprehensive care solution that can be deployed wherever it’s needed – and we believe it’s the future of integrated behavioral health care. 

No two healthcare organizations have the same capabilities or needs 

The needs across organizations vary greatly depending on location, patient population, and access to behavioral health providers.  

That’s why, at Iris, our strategy is to meet organizations where they are and augment whatever components they have in place. Whether that’s a provider team, technology, or processes, we tweak and enhance what’s needed, but never throw out what’s working.  

In our experience, here are just a few examples of patient journeys an organization might look to address when customizing their behavioral health programs: 

  • Oncology care 
  • Women’s health  
  • Employee access programs  
  • Primary care integration  

Integrating behavioral health across all patient journeys can transform your organization and how it delivers care to its community.  

While in some instances we start from square one, other times we build on what an organization already has in place. Everyone’s path to meeting their patient’s behavioral health needs will look different.  

Questions to consider around care models, data analytics, and technology  

When customizing your behavioral health program for your patient’s needs, there are three components every organization should consider – the care model, data analytics, and technology to drive optimal patient engagement.  

Within each of these categories, you can tweak the ingredients to help ensure they fit what your organization needs.  

Here are a few questions and considerations you might start thinking through:  

The  right care model to use:  

  • What are the unique needs of this patient population?  Do they need 24/7 coverage?  What are the common acuity levels and diagnoses?   
  • What are the integration points with this behavioral health program and the broader organization?  How do we drive optimal transitions of care and collaboration?   
  • What provider licensures, types and specializations would best suit our needs?  

The right data to measure:  

  • What KPIs are critical to measure that will drive program operational, clinical and financial success?  
  • How do we capture and measure the critical variables and bring them together to ensure the data is visible and actionable?  
  • Would risk stratification of the patient population bring value to the program?    

The right technology to leverage:  

  • How do we leverage and optimize the existing EMR and technology to drive program success?  
  • Are there ways we should optimize and configure our EMR?  
  • Are there additional tools or solutions we should integrate into our ecosystem that would drive value? 
  • How are we engaging our patients and driving measurement-based care?  

Tailoring your behavioral health program starts by defining what success will look like for your organization. That’s why it’s important to consider what problems you’re solving for and looking at what solutions you already have in place.  

A Virtual Clinic model solves for all these considerations while delivering seamless behavioral health support  

The demand for behavioral health care is continuing to grow at a rate that outpaces the resources available to help. In fact, 40% of U.S. adults and adolescents with mental health conditions never get the care they need.  

A solution like Virtual Clinic ensures behavioral health care is always available throughout every patient journey – whether that’s in primary care or women’s health, patients will get the support they need in a timely manner.  

The Virtual Clinic also ensures that the healthcare organization caring for these patients also gets the support they need, too. By optimizing access and billing, ensuring top-of-license care, and driving behavioral health and physical care integration, organizations can reduce the total cost of care.  

Weaving behavioral care into physical health journeys creates seamless access and better outcomes.  

Tailored behavioral health program design in action with Geisinger Health  

Geisinger Health sought the help of Iris Telehealth to help increase access at scale to help their behavioral health patients across the care continuum.  

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Geisinger saw their behavioral health referrals increase at a fast rate, sometimes exceeding 300 referrals per day.  

Emphasizing the need for providers practicing at the top of their licenses and seeing an opportunity for several new provider roles, Iris developed a best-in-class behavioral health program.   

To support their needs, we created a care navigation assessment led by LCSWs to triage patients in Geisinger’s referral queue and deployed a dedicated team of psychiatrists, psychiatric mental health nurse practitioners and licensed therapists ensure patients got to the right level of care in a timely manner.  

To read the full case study and see the results of work together, click this link.  

Define your needs and get your behavioral health program started with Iris  

Over the last ten years, we’ve been creating the behavioral health building blocks to snap into an organization’s existing program or help create what’s needed from scratch. With our best-in-class capabilities we help fill in the unique gaps of your organization and get your patients the care they need.  

If you’d like to learn more about how we can help your organization tailor your behavioral health program, you can contact us here!