Identifying ways to address behavioral health needs and improve patient satisfaction in the emergency department (ED) is not only beneficial for your health system, but it’s also the right thing to do for patients.
If there isn’t adequate access to behavioral health services across your organization and within your community, patients may feel they have no choice but to seek behavioral health care in the ED. When that happens, ensuring your ED has adequate behavioral health resources to meet that patient demand can be a substantial difference-maker for patient satisfaction, quality, and even length of stay.
Health systems have an opportunity to help patients get the quality, life-changing care they need and deserve.
By embracing the patient and leveraging virtual behavioral health services to ensure they’re well taken care of during their time in the ED and have a good plan after discharge, health systems are better positioned to retain patients and help them throughout their healthcare journey (even beyond the ED).
54% of U.S. hospitals have no psychiatrist available for ED and inpatient consultation services
In 2022, 6 million people sought care for mental, behavioral, or neurodevelopmental disorders in the ED.
A study from the Mayo Clinic on specialty psychiatric services in emergency departments found the following results:
59% of hospitals say they transferred a psychiatric patient to a different hospital due to lack of available services
Only 27% of hospitals had consultation services available for psychiatric patients
54% of U.S. hospitals had no psychiatrist available for medical ED and inpatient consultation services
With the high demand for behavioral health care in the hospital setting, it is critical your organization provides quick access to quality care.
“For many health systems, the emergency department is becoming like an inpatient unit. For organizations that partner with a telehealth solution like ours, patients can be seen by a psychiatrist or a Psychiatric Nurse Practitioner (PMHNP) in less than an hour of when they present to the ED.
From there, we can work with the ED staff on starting or restarting necessary medications or guiding the course of treatment – which makes for a better patient experience and smoother workflows for the on-site care teams.”
Dr. Thomas Milam, Chief Medical Officer
Across the board, patients report high satisfaction rates with telehealth.
For example, an article from the American Medical Association, cites 79% of patients were very satisfied with the care they received during their last telehealth visit, with 73% saying they would continue using virtual care in the future.
60% of patients said they waited 10+ hours to be seen by a mental health professional in the ED
Today, patients seeking behavioral health support in the ED spend a lot of time waiting and don’t always receive adequate information or resources to support them long-term and prevent them from returning to the ED.
60% of patients waited 10+ hours to be seen by a mental health professional in the ED
54% said there was no information given to them about prescribed medications
65% were not given information about outpatient or community care
Anecdotally, patients also reported feeling very isolated and not taken seriously in their ED experience.
If you’re looking for ways to improve the patient experience, increasing access to dedicated behavioral health services and specialists in the ED is a positive step in the right direction to ensuring patient needs are being addressed.
Virtual care helps reduce the amount of time patients spend in the ED
Patient satisfaction stems from the ability to address specific needs and track progress to ensure important metrics are being met.
On the operational side, having insights into how your clinicians are performing can help optimize care, ensure quality treatment, and help keep patients safe.
Through our strategic approach to quality management, we’ve helped our partners reduce the length of stay in their MedSurg units by 0.5 days, increased ED discharge rates from 55% to 62%, and reduced their length of stay in the ED from 12 to 9 hours.
Overall, our partners have seen an 80% improvement in ED throughput by leveraging a strategy that ensures patients get to the right level of care and have the behavioral health care they need to address their specialty behavioral health needs.
Get started with behavioral health integration
Every hospital’s central value boils down to caring for patients and ensuring they’re well taken care of – body and mind. Whether your ED has leveraged virtual before or is looking for innovative solutions that will support patients long-term – there’s no bad place to start.
If you’d like to learn more about how Iris Telehealth can help integrate behavioral health into your organization, please contact us today.
Achieving value-based care for your health system can increase quality patient care, improve provider satisfaction, and reduce total cost of care for your organization.
But how can your health system achieve these benefits? Keep reading to learn how to advance your journey toward value-based care in a scalable and financially sustainable way.
Value-based care improves patient outcomes
Value-based care helps hold providers accountable for improving patient outcomes and gives them more flexibility to provide the right care at the right time.
While many health systems aim to provide value-based care, it’s not always possible given the need to treat a large variety of ages, acuities, and diagnoses.
For example, due to increasing patient volumes, many hospitals must triage patients who need referrals and immediate help in the ED. This approach causes delayed care and no follow-up, creating a barrier to providing the care that patients need and deserve.
Due to growing referral queues, follow-up challenges, and inefficient workflows, helping patients receive a high level of care isn’t always an option. Before an organization can be proactive and lean into a value-based care model, they must help patients with effective care that facilitates better patient outcomes and fills gaps in ambulatory and post-acute behavioral health care.
Fortunately, strategic and purposeful virtual behavioral health care services can help health systems address need in their ED and throughout their hospital.
Filling gaps in care across the behavioral health continuum
Every health system faces a hierarchy of needs regarding patient care, and helping those with the highest acuity is top priority. To help the most patients and remain financially sustainable, investing in the right behavioral health programs and resources is essential.
What does a financially sustainable behavioral health program look like in practice? Let’s take a look at two essential solutions health systems are leveraging today:
On-Demand Services: This solution helps organizations decrease the burden on their care teams by providing 24/7 ED support – improving wait times and costly and inefficient psychiatric boarding in the hospital.
Virtual Clinic: By integrating behavioral health through the patient journey, this solution helps improve holistic care and ultimately decrease long-term costs.
Both of these solutions deploy fully integrated quality tracking and data analytics to drive optimization and ensure these programs run effectively and continue improving patient outcomes.
Benefits of value-based behavioral health care
Once an organization achieves value-based behavioral health care for their population, they reap many benefits, some of which, according to The Commonwealth Fund include reduction in cost care and improvement of quality of care. The Commonwealth Fund also highlights how value-based care can transform collaboration and allow providers to spend more time facilitating care related to counseling or screening for social needs.
Additionally, according to a behavioral health analysis by Evernorth Health Services, treating behavioral health conditions in outpatient care is directly tied with a reduction in medical and pharmacy costs. In their analysis, they highlight savings up to $2,565 per person over the 15 months following a diagnosis and up to $3,321 per person over the 27 months following a diagnosis.
Here are a few other key benefits that value-based behavioral health care can provide:
Healthier and more satisfied patient population
More fulfilled providers facilitating quality care
Lower total cost of care that helps you meet financial objectives
Better care so patients don’t escalate
At Iris Telehealth, our partners have successfully leveraged our services and helped move their organization towards a value-based care model. At Geisinger Health, we’ve helped procure the following results with Bridge Care Services:
83% reduction in referral backlog (18,000 – 3,000) within 6 months
40 % of their psychiatry referrals were diverted to a lower, more cost-effective level of care
38% improvement in their patient’s depression symptoms over eight weeks of care
Get started on your journey towards value-based care mental health services
If you’d like to learn more about how we can help your organization help your hospital or health system address patient needs in your community, contact us today
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
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.
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.
For health systems, meeting patient’s behavioral health needs in a scalable and financially sustainable way requires quality behavioral health programming, specialized providers, and strategic partners who will support their programs and ensure they’re achieving their clinical and organizational goals.
In this blog, we will share four ways health systems are leveraging virtual behavioral health to optimize their programs and set themselves up for long-term success.
1. Health systems are leveraging virtual behavioral health care to improve care in their inpatient psych units
The American Hospital Association (AHA) notes health systems leveraging behavioral health integration can see more patients using their outpatient care services and less patients in their ED for behavioral disorders.
AHA also reported that leveraging an integrated behavioral health model for delivering inpatient psychiatric services can support a 70% return on investment.
Leveraging virtual behavioral health providers also creates continuity of care for the patient, enabling relationship building and not requiring patients to re-tell their stories. Having a virtual provider on the team also gives on-site providers a specialist they can lean on for guidance.
“To have an established Iris Telehealth provider was incredibly important because it created reliability on the unit. We knew exactly what we were working with when we had the physician. She was very reliable, and it created continuity of care.”
Laura Taylor, Program Director of Psychiatry at Carillion Clinic, Iris Telehealth Partner
The integration of virtual care in the inpatient psychiatric unit alleviates behavioral health provider staffing shortages that impact patient experiences and outcomes in this care setting and enables clinicians to practice at the top of their licenses to improve total cost of care and provider satisfaction.
Reflecting on the important role virtual care has played in their inpatient unit, Chief of the Department of Psychiatry at Basset Health Network, Dr. James Anderson said, “Telehealth is an important arrow in our quiver to be able to expand virtual health to include providing services on the inpatient end. “
2. Health systems are facilitating whole person care by leveraging virtual behavioral health services
Research from the National Library of Medicine shows that 74.9% of psychiatric patients in the inpatient unit had at least one medical comorbidity, including 57.5% of people between the ages of 18 and 24, making whole-person care a crucial component of a scalable and financially sustainable behavioral health program.
Additionally, according to the American Psychological Association (APA), treatment of behavioral health conditions in the primary care setting offsets costs by 20-40%.
They also report fewer hospitalizations that result in reduced costs for patients with comorbidities and improvement in treatment adherence.
For health systems, behavioral health programming, like Bridge Care Services, helps ensure patients who need care first get care first, while being efficiently directed to an appropriate care plan. Bridge Care Services helps solve ambulatory care at scale and delivers long-term clinical and financial outcomes.
This approach ensures patients who need escalation from primary care receive timely access to quality treatment – whether that’s through therapy, medication management, or both.
“The care navigation and therapeutic support from [Bridge Care Services] alleviates the burden on the health system’s resources using a cost-effective process that closes referrals to specialists sooner and returns patients to community providers when available.”
Dr. Thomas Milam, Chief Medical Officer, Iris Telehealth
By providing more timely access to care, health systems are better positioned to achieve measurement-based outcomes and optimize reimbursement. Additionally, by providing whole-person care, their patients feel supported and experience better outcomes.
3. Health systems are improving quality measures by leveraging behavioral health partners
In the U.S., 15 million people report an unmet need for behavioral health treatment. At the same time, most health systems across the country are not equipped to meet the significant behavioral health demands of their communities.
For example, Elliot Health System, was experiencing high demand for behavioral health care. For Elliot, one out of every five calls to their triage nurses were for behavioral health, with an average of call being 27 to 30 minutes.
That level of demand was unsustainable, and they needed efficient patient care and to protect their staff from burnout. By leveraging virtual behavioral health services, they were able to improve their outcomes and meet their quality goals.
“We were able to convert triage calls into actual full intakes from a licensed social worker that provided the patient with a full evaluation and were billable. We were able to cover the cost of investing in provider hiring by converting those triage calls to a full intake.
There’s a brief triage (assessing presence of a crisis), then the patients have an intake and transfer within one to two business days. That visit is billable. It’s a benefit for everyone and helped make this new program sustainable.”
Dr. Holly Mintz, Chief Medical Officer, Elliot Health System, Iris Telehealth Partner
Today, 80% of virtual care at Elliot Health System is for their behavioral health services. Additionally, they were able to decrease their intake wait time from 60 to 1-3 business days.
4. Health systems are building scalable and financially sustainable behavioral health programs through virtual care
According to a report from Evernorth Behavioral Health, treating behavioral health conditions in outpatient settings is directly tied to a reduction in medical and pharmacy costs.
Health systems report savings up to $2,565 per person over the 15 months following a diagnosis and up to $3,321 per person over the 27 months following a diagnosis.
At Texas Health Resources (THR), Chief Operating Officer, Kathi Cox, sees success in behavioral health being well-integrated into patient care.
“Traditionally, you have a lot of primary care physicians or specialists dealing with their patient’s medical health over here and mental health issues over there – it’s very disjointed.
Now that we’ve created a much more integrated approach, there’s an opportunity for those things to work together. If we are collaborating across the organization for these patients, I think that’s a big success area.”
Kathi Cox, Chief Operating Officer, Ambulatory and Virtual Channel Texas Health Resources, Iris Telehealth Partner
Iris Telehealth’s Chief Marketing & Strategy Officer, Dan Ferris, sees integrated behavioral health as a tool to drive competitive differentiation for health systems, saying, “Providing quality behavioral health is a strategic advantage and can be financially sustainable. If an organization can offer integrated behavioral health at scale, they can attract more patients, reduce leakage, and improve the total cost of care.”
About Iris Telehealth
At Iris, we’re proud to partner with organizations like the ones mentioned in this piece every day. Through their hard work, dedication, and partnership, we can extend access to care to people all over the country – regardless of age, diagnoses, or acuity.
If you’d like to learn more about how you can help your health system scale and optimize your behavioral health program, don’t hesitate to contact us today!
Virtual care helps transform a health system’s approach to behavioral health care, giving their communities and providers much needed support. However, there are several considerations to keep in mind when it comes to virtual behavioral health integration.
In a webinar hosted by Becker’s Hospital Review, healthcare leaders from Elliot Health System and Texas Health Resources shared their strategic and economic cases for behavioral health integration, insights into implementing virtual services into their organizations, and the benefits of integration.
Provider shortages make virtual behavioral health a strategic priority in Texas and New Hampshire
The behavioral health provider shortage continues to be a challenge for many healthcare organizations. And, according to the Texas Department of State Health Services, 246 of the 254 counties in the state are designated as Health Professional Shortage Areas.
Kathi Cox, Chief Operating Officer, Ambulatory & Virtual Channel at Texas Health Resources (THR) shared that Texas is one of largest growing areas in the country and with more people moving to the region, the demand for behavioral health grows.
“Texas Health happens to be one of the health systems in this community that has a very robust inpatient behavioral health service line across multiple hospitals within our system. However, we didn’t have any low acute services as part of our portfolio.”
She went onto share that depression is at an all-time high and there’s a lack of resources to treat the youth and senior members of their community. For low acuity behavioral health, Cox shared that patients may be waiting anywhere from six to 10 weeks for a first appointment.
“When we think about Texas Health and how we approach this, the idea was to provide a longitudinal offering for the people in our community that would allow them to be treated for behavioral health within an integrated network of providers across our primary care physicians and our hospitals.”
Kathi Cox, Chief Operating Officer, Ambulatory and Virtual Channel, Texas Health Resources
In New Hampshire, Dr. Holly Mintz, Chief Medical Officer at Elliot Health System (Elliot), shared that they have also experienced a shortage of resources, citing they’re one of the few hospitals that have an inpatient behavioral health and geriatric psychiatry unit.
Reflecting on the lack of resources in their community, Dr. Mintz discussed the importance of ensuring patients had someone they could see for their behavioral health needs.
“We looked at the number of behavioral health calls that our triage nurses were receiving, and we knew we needed to do better. We needed to do better in placing people with therapists and better understanding what they need as far as either medication management or therapy.
We want to make sure that it was not acceptable to have a 60-day wait between a referral and an intake process, let alone seeing a provider. We really needed to focus on decreasing the time to care, which we knew would benefit care holistically.”
Virtual behavioral health care enables early access to treatment and better outcomes
Behavioral health touches everyone and making sure people can get care they need when they need it is at the heart of every healthcare organization’s mission.
Additionally, implementing a solution like virtual behavioral health care comes with considerations health systems must think through to determine where it will fit into their priorities and ensure the solution makes good financial sense.
At Elliot, Dr. Mintz says they viewed virtual behavioral health as an avenue to improve early access, positively impact outcomes, and prevent hospitalizations.
Dr. Mintz shares they learned that one out of every five calls their triage nurses received were about behavioral health, and the average length of the call was around 27 to 30 minutes, causing providers to burn out and keeping patients from timely care.
“We were able to convert those triage calls into actual full intakes from a licensed social worker, that provided the patient with a full evaluation, and were billable. We were able to cover the cost of investing in provider hiring by converting those triage calls to a full intake.
There’s a brief triage (assessing presence of a crisis), then the patients have an intake and transfer within one to two business days. That visit is billable. It’s a benefit for everyone and helped make this new program sustainable.”
Dr. Holly Mintz, Chief Medical Officer, Ambulatory Care Services, Elliot Health Systems
“For our chronic patients, whether they are facing CHS challenges, COPD, hypertension or diabetes, behavioral health ends up being an underlying challenge for these patients. The benefit for all the service lines comes when we can address those mental health challenges of those patients.”
Behavioral health integration defines success for health systems
Every organization defines success differently. However, one common thread between Elliot and THR is ensuring behavioral health care is a priority and well-integrated into patient care.
Reflecting on this Cox shared her vision of what success at THR looks like in the next several years.
“Success in three to five years looks like very strong relationships between our behavioral health and employed physicians – whether that’s in our psychiatric practice, inpatient, or outpatient space. Rather than it be two different areas – these groups are working together.
Traditionally, you have a lot of primary care physicians or specialists dealing with their patient’s medical health over here and mental health issues over there – it’s very disjointed.
Now that we’ve created a much more integrated approach, there’s an opportunity for those things to work together. If we are collaborating across the organization for these patients, I think that’s a big success area.”
Kathi Cox, Chief Operating Officer, Ambulatory and Virtual Channel, Texas Health Resources
For Dr. Mintz, she shared Elliot aims to create a straightforward system for their behavioral health patients.
“We are looking to enhance a straightforward process for patients and help them navigate it. So, when somebody presents with cancer, there’s a nurse navigator that helps them navigate through the system.
What we hope to do is make things very simple so when a primary care provider sees a patient who needs behavioral health services and has a general assessment of what they need, they’re referred to one place – there’s not nine different referrals where they could potentially go, and there’s an understanding of what the provider feels that patient needs.”
Payers are becoming more aware of the need to provide behavioral health services
For health systems, transforming their service lines comes with considerations around payers. At Elliot, Dr. Mintz shared that payers are becoming more aware of the need to provide behavioral health services, noting that insurance companies are becoming more expansive.
Dr. Mintz also said that they continue discussing the importance of expanding opportunities for behavioral health patients with lawmakers and their Department of Health and Human Services.
For THR, Cox noted that they’re cautiously optimistic about the payer.
“We’re still a fee for service area of the country, value-based hasn’t really hit us at all here in Texas. Everything we do is very fee-for-service based. I think that payers are saying that behavioral health is important.
We still have not seen an adjustment in how their coverage may be expanded or reimbursed in a meaningful way that pays for the cost of taking care of patients.”
At times, access to community mental health centers can be delayed up to a year
For primary care providers, they may not always be comfortable working with behavioral health patients without the specialty expertise or insights into medication management.
At Elliot, Dr. Mintz shared that one of the most common things she hears from their medical group is the challenges they face with patients who have behavioral health conditions they’re not comfortable managing.
For example, if a patient is on medications or doses that the provider isn’t comfortable with, Dr. Mintz says it demands and deserves a specialty opinion.
She went on to say that a key challenge with managing these patients is access and it sometimes can be delayed up to a year for community mental health centers.
To address these challenges, Dr. Mintz shared that Elliot is developing a stability clinic for patients who need a higher level of care.
“We’re also enabling the providers to help explain to patients what they actually need so that the patients can understand they’re going to be with somebody for three months temporarily, but they will be transitioned to another level of care.”
The key to internal buy-in for launching a behavioral health program
Implementing a behavioral health program comes with financial and practical considerations that can help influence buy-in from stakeholders across the organization.
At THR, Cox shared that they have a strategic initiative called, “Vision 2026,” that puts the patient at the center of every decision they make. Together, they worked to better understand their community and determine where their patients were going for care.
They also wanted to tune into their data and have a good understanding whether they need to build or buy a solution. When they started to look for a partner, they did a lot of research and shared the findings with their organization.
Cox also shared that the patients were a key part of the equation, along with their overall organization.
“Up until now we released them [patients] into the wild with no way to lasso them back or to have physicians where their medical home was, have information about their treatment.
Then finally, the last stakeholder is our organization. We want to make sure they understand how we are staying accountable and what the outcomes are that we promised and how we are achieving them.”
For Dr. Mintz at Elliot, her team met with their medical group to understand their challenges and their primary take away was the need for behavioral health access.
They also determined integrating a solution that would provide more support would inherently drive provider satisfaction and be appealing to future providers.
“We were able to help engage our senior leadership in really bolstering our outpatient support, in addition to the fact that we all know it’s a competitive world out there, and we’re all hoping to attract providers, triage nurses, and medical assistants.
If we can take a situation that is causing a significant amount of stress and manage it better, we hope that we will be on people’s top of mind for a place where they want to work and deliver care.”
Dr. Holly Mintz, Chief Medical Officer, Ambulatory Care Services, Elliot Health Systems
At Elliot, 80% of virtual care is for their behavioral health services
Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been much discussion around a virtual versus an in-person approach to healthcare.
For behavioral health, virtual care has helped expand the reach of care and help open up the pool of providers available to organizations like Elliot and THR.
At Elliot, Dr. Mintz shared the exceptional advantage virtual care provides to their organization overall and the time to care for patients.
“We’ve been able to hire four to five other providers who are working virtually, who are helping us manage our behavioral health patients, both with therapy as well as with intake. Virtual care allowed us to expand beyond our state walls.
We’ve gone from a 60 day wait for an intake to now we can do an intake within one to three business days, and that’s because of telehealth.”
Next steps to building out your health system’s behavioral health programming
We are so grateful for the time Dr. Holly Mintz and Kathi Cox shared with us. Thank you for your partnership and for all the incredible work you are all doing to expand behavioral health to your community.
If you’d like to learn more and figure out the next steps to building out your health systems behavioral health programming, you can contact us today to get started!
Each day in IT is different, especially at Iris Telehealth where our team is responsible for supporting both clinicians and corporate team members. Their care and personability, alongside their in-depth technical expertise, sets them apart and creates exceptional experiences for the clinical and corporate sides of the house.
In this piece, we’ll take a look at some of the key duties and workflows our IT team puts in place to support our mission of creating a better world through healthy minds.
The mission of the IT team
Our IT team is multifaced. Through clinician support, IT creates reliability and confidence that providers will always have someone to turn to for technical support. In turn, our partners and their patients can depend on uninterrupted care and support.
For our Iris team members, this team supports workflows, efficiencies, and makes sure they have what they need to support our partners and clinicians.
The IT team works 24/7 to support our services. For example, for Iris’s On-Demand Services line, providers may need assistance at all hours of the night and into the early morning. Our IT team is there to answer the call and make sure they have the support they need to keep seeing patients.
On a daily basis, this team is communicating with team members, assisting with tickets, and setting up orientations for providers and new corporate employees. They’re also helping build laptops for new team members and sending out emergency laptops when needed.
They’re also consistently monitoring security, doing regular health checks, and making sure everyone can do their jobs efficiently. Additionally, this team is also looking at the various licenses our team’s leverage to ensure they’re being utilized efficiently and look at ways to cut costs.
Over the last few years, this team has saved the company significant spending costs by cutting licenses and transiting into different software and merging applications. This consistent monitoring helps ensure the most efficient workflows and the best outcomes for our teams.
Top notch support for providers and organizations
One of the primary goals of the IT team is to set our providers up for success and ensure they know they have someone to rely on whenever they have a technical challenge. For Iris providers, the goal is to support their technical needs so they can focus on what they do best – providing high-quality patient care.
Regardless of how tech savvy a provider may be, the IT team views it as their job to make the provider feel comfortable. That’s why, during the resolution process, the IT team makes sure to give updates on progress to help ease the provider’s minds and allow them to continue doing their work without worry of a lingering technical problem.
On the partner side, our IT team ensure Iris providers have minimal downtime. For example, if a provider is encountering technical challenges with their laptop that can’t be solved with extensive troubleshooting, they quickly build a new laptop and send it to the provider overnight.
This level of support also takes the pressure off our partner’s shoulders. They can rely on our team to ensure our providers have the technical support they need, without tying up their in-house IT department.
Measurements of success
Most recently, the IT team was required to onboard two large groups of providers at one time. This process required coordination, laptop builds, answering calls, and managing a large surge of provider orientations. They handled everything seamlessly and our providers were able to get going without technical hang-ups.
Here are a few of their accomplishments over the last year:
3,000 tickets resolved
Over 180 laptops built and replaced
99% satisfaction rate among Iris providers and team members
Additionally, this team maintains a 95-percentile rate for Service Level Agreement (SLA). That means if there are 500 tickets in a month, only 3-4% of tickets in responding or resolving quickly were violated. The remaining are answered or receive a response within the hour.
Learn more about our support pillars
If you’d like to learn more about the technical side of implementing telehealth into your organization, contact us today.
Additionally, if you’d like to learn more about the support our teams provide, you can view additional spotlights here:
At Iris, we’re proud to collaborate with our partners to help them succeed and be prepared for any challenges they may face in their day-to-day operations.
Ten years ago, helping healthcare organizations understand virtual workflows and virtual care pathways was much more complicated than it is today. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, the adoption of virtual care across all medical specialties and primary care has been critical, especially in behavioral health.
Today, behavioral health usage rates remain high. At Iris Telehealth, it’s not unusual for our partners to use telehealth 50-75% of the time for behavioral health care services. Everyone is used to telehealth.
That means, rather than primarily focusing on connecting and seeing patients (the core of virtual care), we’re now able to focus on emerging workflows that enable analytics that track no-show rates, billing and coding patterns, and patient engagement.
One area where we’ve seen a high opportunity for workflow improvement and high impact on patient outcomes is leveraging virtual care in the inpatient psychiatric unit.
The reality of behavioral health care in the health system
Behavioral health patients seeking care for urgent issues and experiencing long wait times in the health system is nothing new. That’s because many hospitals don’t have access to behavioral health resources. When they don’t have this access, they leverage social workers for care coordination, therapy, and patient support.
If a patient comes in with cardiac or lung issues, you want them to meet with a provider with the appropriate skill set and knowledge to assess them based on their presentation. Many emergency departments have excellent providers who have been able to treat behavioral health patients, but nowadays the acuity is much higher.
Access to inpatient treatment for patients who might be manic, psychotic, or experiencing withdrawal can be challenging – and it may not always be easy and efficient to direct them to the appropriate hospital bed or step-down unit.
That’s where we’re finding that, for many health systems, the emergency department is becoming like an inpatient unit. For organizations that partner with a telehealth solution like ours, patients can be seen by a psychiatrist or a Psychiatric Nurse Practitioner (PMHNP) in less than an hour of when they present to the ED.
From there, we can work with the ED staff on starting or restarting necessary medications or guiding the course of treatment – which makes for a better patient experience and smoother workflows for the on-site care teams.
In-person care verses virtual in inpatient psychiatric units
Through our partnerships with major hospitals and health systems across the country, we have found that hospitals and inpatient psychiatric units that have adopted workflows enable virtual care work very well.
When working with an organization, we like to learn about their culture around telehealth. We learn about their history and how they’ve embraced telehealth in the past.
It’s important for organizations to consider that the quality of an in-person provider isn’t necessarily better than that of a virtual care provider. We can get high-quality providers who want to work from their homes and virtually go into the inpatient psychiatry unit and ED, allowing patients to experience the high-quality care and professionalism they need and deserve.
Also, hospitals can have long-term virtual care providers seeing patients on inpatient units and engaging in rounding, team meetings, consults, and admitting/discharging patients.
A virtual behavioral health provider can be just as accessible throughout the day as an in-person provider. While you can’t knock on their door, you can send them a note through an instant messaging platform, text, or even call them on the phone just like an in-person provider.
There are many clinical duties on inpatient psychiatry units that require in-person support such as psych techs, nurses, and staff for things like lab draws and physical exams. However, in terms of behavioral health specialists, virtual providers can facilitate care that is as good as, or better than, in-person providers an organization might be able to recruit.
The key to integrating virtual and in-person providers
No matter the level of clinical care, trusting your team members is key, and that means spending time together. It’s important to note that being virtual doesn’t mean a provider is sitting at home doing nothing—it’s more like they’re in an office or a hospital next door. They may be 500 miles away, but they’re still available and responsive to patient and staff needs and questions.
For example, a nurse might have a question, or a patient might need to be seen twice or more during the day for something like an exacerbation of symptoms, possible side effects, or requesting to leave. In such cases a virtual provider would come back on video to see the patient and discuss concerns with the onsite team or even gather more collateral from family.
An on-site provider might be in a different location, stuck in traffic, and unavailable. However, a virtual provider can transcend those geographic barriers and see patients quickly with little if any delay.
Virtual care lends itself to collaboration and integration with on-site teams quite well. It allows for flexible, timely, and patient-centered care.
Virtual behavioral health programs and inpatient care
Continuity of care is critical to the patient experience. When you’re working with complex patients, it’s important to try and have continuity of care with the techs working around them and the nurses that can know and understand the nuances of their behavior.
With a solution like Scheduled Services, which is Iris’s approach to delivering virtual care, you have a provider working in the same units day after day — or being a part of the weeknight and weekend call teams and rounding team.
Building up the sense of continuity with the team and having that trust, consistency of care, and communication with patients in their behavioral health journey in the acute setting is very important.
Generally, our providers work on inpatient units just as an in-person provider would, though virtually. They have the same meetings, experiences with patients, and communication with the care team – all to help build that continuity.
The financial benefits of virtual behavioral health programs
There are also benefits of virtual behavioral health programs that lead to better financial outcomes. For example, by treating behavioral health, patients receive more holistic care that helps treat physical conditions in tandem, better improving total cost of care and reducing length of stay.
Additionally, having a virtual behavioral health solution in place can help improve ED throughput and ensure patients aren’t staying in the hospital longer than necessary.
There have also been recent policy shifts that have created major evolutions in how CMS and congress are working to look at virtual care reimbursement. It’s been more progressive than anything I’ve seen in my last 30 years of being in this field.
Change doesn’t happen a lot in medicine, but the recent changes to promote virtual access to care, particularly for people with mental health and substance use disorder issues, have been impressive and a huge win for patients and providers alike.
The future of behavioral health care
It’s important to challenge the myth that having someone on-site is better or necessary. Healthcare is moving away from care being solely driven by what happens in a brick and mortar facility.
In the future, not only will providers be working from home, but they’re also going to be seeing acute patients in the patient’s homes–patients who might otherwise have been hospitalized—in the emerging “hospital at home” and “remote patient monitoring” models that lend themselves quite naturally to virtual care.
Virtual care is helping the healthcare industry rethink our models and how we care for patients, both in acute care settings like inpatient units and partial hospital programs. Across the spectrum of care, virtual care continues to impact patients’ lives in ways that those of us in behavioral health care can really see.
If you’d like to learn more about how Iris Telehealth can integrate virtual behavioral health programs into your hospital or health system, please don’t hesitate to reach out. You can contact us here or check out this page to learn more about Scheduled Services.
A study from the Mayo Clinic found that, of 2,300 U.S. hospitals surveyed, 54% had no psychiatrist on staff or available for medical ED or inpatient consultations. When admissions for active psychiatric patients were needed, 59% of hospitals transferred them to another hospital – creating leakage within the health system.
For patients who stay within the hospital system and need care over 30 days, Beckers Healthcare highlights that it can create additional healthcare costs of $2,265 per stay.
However, effective and efficient behavioral health integration can help decrease costs and improve patient experience. In their annual Environmental Scan, the American Hospital Association (AHA), shares that an inpatient integrated behavioral health model resulted in a 159% return on investment, and a study of six primary care practices found integration reduced ED visits by 14.2%.
Integrating virtual care partnerships to support inpatient psychiatric units offers a simple solution to a complicated problem and helps keep patients from falling through care gaps. By bringing in a virtual behavioral health provider, patients can get the care they need, health systems can avoid leakage, and provider time can be used more effectively.
Integrating virtual care into the inpatient psychiatric unit
Making virtual care available in your inpatient psychiatric unit, your health system can alleviate staffing challenges, transform the patient and provider experience, and assist their on-site providers with behavioral health clinicians.
Teams are connected with a dedicated provider who serves the hospital on a consistent basis each week.
Virtual behavioral health care allows organizations to recruit from a larger pool of providers than they might not otherwise have access to in their geographic region. This capability allows patients to get the quality care they need for complex behavioral health conditions.
We call our virtual solution for this Scheduled Services, which ensures access to high-quality behavioral health providers who are dedicated to our partner healthcare organizations on a consistent schedule and are matched to the needs of their communities and care teams. This approach creates continuity of care for patients with complex behavioral health conditions. Additionally, virtual behavioral health providers have flexibility and can provide the same consistency that an on-site provider can and doesn’t position patients to have to repeatedly tell their stories.
Virtual behavioral health providers can round virtually and work weekends and nights – whenever care is needed. This flexibility also enables care team integration and allows providers to attend team meetings and be available to other clinicians just as they would if they were in-person. Virtual providers can collaborate, join team huddles, and consult with their team.
The benefits of a virtual provider solution
Virtual behavioral health solutions help patients get seen more quickly, reduce expenses, and help promote quality care for patients who might otherwise be left waiting for treatment or end up back in the emergency department.
When determining who to partner with for a virtual behavioral health solution, it’s important to consider what other supports come along with the addition of a provider.
At Iris Telehealth, we pride ourselves on the support we provide to our partners to make sure they’re matched with a provider who has the right skillset and knowledge to treat the level of acuity they see within their inpatient units. We also provide clinical alignment executives who support and serve as a primary point of contact for our partners.
These pillars of support also extend to help with licensing and credentialing as well as quality management services to ensure our providers are helping organizations meet their key behavioral health goals.
Treating behavioral health patients in the inpatient unit is no easy task, but we do our best to support each organization so they can experience the benefits of a virtual behavioral health solution.
How virtual behavioral health enables continuity of care
When a patient can’t get the care they need, when they need it, they may end up leaving the health system and going somewhere else for care. This potential for leakage is costly and creates a poor experience for patients.
When a health system has a behavioral health specialist readily available, the patient’s chance of being seen quickly increases. They receive proper evaluation and lessen their risk of their symptoms becoming exacerbated.
Additionally, in-person care may not meet demand in the same way a virtual solution can. There are several barriers an in-person provider may encounter versus someone working virtually. For example, while weather or traffic could keep a provider from making it into the unit, a virtual provider has consistent flexibility that supports a consistent schedule.
Patients may need to be seen again and having a provider they know, trust, and can count on, can make all the difference in their care. Helping provide care to patients that’s high-quality and specialized can help them experience better outcomes and build trust with your organization.
How to get started with Scheduled Services
At Iris, we’re proud of the level of care we provide to patients. That’s why we have a 97% average patient satisfaction rate and a 92% partner retention rate. Additionally, our commitment to quality has helped us gain Joint Commission accreditation. We’ve treated 2.3M+ patients and counting and we’re eager to see how we can help those in your community get the behavioral health care they need and deserve.
If you’d like to learn more about how Scheduled Services can be integrated into your health system, don’t hesitate to reach out today. Contact us here for more information.
Meeting behavioral health patients with timely support, appropriate care, and proper follow-up is essential to their care journeys. Unfortunately, finding the right care isn’t always easy. Between provider shortages, increased demand for behavioral health treatment, and social determinants of health, patients may spend a lot of time waiting for care without ever receiving the support they need.
Bridge Care Services ensures the patients who need care first get care first – while being efficiently directed to an appropriate care plan. Keep reading to learn more about how bridge care enables Behavioral Health Integration across health systems.
A dedicated bridge care program can help support health systems via a behavioral health integration model backed by clinical and operational expertise to solve common challenges health systems face in delivering ambulatory care in a scalable and sustainable way. This model ensures patients with a behavioral health referral get timely, high-quality care and appropriate treatment and follow-up – all while improving a health system’s total cost of care.
Keys to success:
Augmenting behavioral health access: Any system struggling with its referral volumes needs a mechanism to augment its clinical bandwidth to reduce its backlog – whether that means optimizing existing resources or leveraging a third-party partner like Iris Telehealth.
Financial sustainability: Health systems have to maintain financial sustainability for any program to stand the test of time. A bridge care program should be designed accordingly and optimized for reimbursement.
Care navigation: Clinical recommendations that direct the patient to the right type of care, from the right type of provider.
Quality Management: To ensure the success of any program, your care team needs high visibility into what’s going right – and what’s going wrong – across your workflows and patient and clinical outcomes. Bridge care leverages clinical support and oversights throughout the care program lifecycle to manage data-driven outcomes and demonstrate clinical and operational impact.
How Bridge Care Services works
There are six components that make up Bridge Care Services and help more people get the care they need.
Here’s how those components work to support health systems:
Cross-functional care team: Our cross-functional care team of psychiatrists, therapists, and psychiatric mental health nurse practitioners will fully integrate into your health system.
Clinical prioritization: Referred patients are entered into a risk-stratified patient registry that undergoes a clinical review to ensure the patients who need help first, get seen first.
Navigation assessments: A Licensed Clinical Social Worker will complete a Navigation Assessment to determine the appropriate level of care.
High-quality care: Patients referred to Iris will receive the appropriate care plan for their needs. Whether that is medication management, therapy or both – and whether that is short-term care or longer-term care – we ensure each patient receives efficient, quality care.
Collaborative transition:Once a patient can be safely managed by their primary care provider, ambulatory service, or community clinic – an Iris Care Coordinator helps facilitate a supported transition to the next care setting in the patient’s journey.
Iris Insights:Your health system will have the backing of Iris clinical and operational excellence to ensure sustainable behavioral health care.
With the immense need for care, health systems are overwhelmed. Thankfully, Bridge Care Services can help organizations with the influx they’re experiencing, provide additional support, and continue providing the highest quality of care they’re accustomed to delivering to their patients.
When implemented properly in a health system, Bridge Care Services can help:
Improve total cost of care
Deliver optimized Behavioral Health Integration across the whole system
Support organizational quality measures
Increase patient satisfaction
Decrease provider burnout
Retain patients within the health system
Keep patients in the referral queue out of the ED
Support longitudinal care
Reduce 30-day readmission rates
Promote referring provider satisfaction
Bridge Care Services helps provide a transformative process for health systems, their teams, and the patients they serve.
Where Iris Telehealth fits in
At Iris Telehealth, we believe patients deserve access to high-quality behavioral health care. That’s why we walk with them throughout their care journeys to help ensure they get the most effective care possible. If you’d like to learn more about our Bridge Care Services program, contact us today.
Integrating behavioral health across all patient journeys can transform a health system and how it delivers care for its community.
As Chief Strategy & Marketing Officer at Iris Telehealth, I’ve seen first-hand the impact effective behavioral health integration can have on a health system and its patients. Whether through better clinical outcomes and access, increased revenue, or positive margins – our health system partners sustainably leverage and integrate scalable behavioral health services seamlessly across their ecosystem.
Learn how our partners are finding success by integrating behavioral health services across their health systems, what the patient journey looks like through a virtual lens, and the financial impact virtual services can have on a health system.
The tangible impact of integrating behavioral health services
Experiencing the tangible impacts of integrated behavioral health services starts by providing timely access to quality care – and making sure that care is financially sustainable.
Once the need for behavioral health care is met, health systems may experience the following benefits:
Better access
Better patient outcomes
Improved financials
Reduced total cost of care
A patient and provider community that feels supported
Helping health systems take back control of a fragmented healthcare landscape
Today, health systems are being disaggregated by a myriad of competitors – both new and old. This trend is contributing to lower health system revenue, but also to a further fragmentation of the patient journey. At Iris, we want to help health systems take back control of this fragmentation to ensure patients are getting integrated, whole-person care.
We believe providing integrated behavioral healthcare is a critical component to patient care. The reality is – behavioral healthcare should be infused into every journey. Whether a patient just received a cancer diagnosis, is an expecting mother, or is experiencing escalating anxiety at a primary care appointment, integrating behavioral health care will drive better patient care and eliminate the need for a patient to look elsewhere to fill gaps in their care needs.
At the end of the day, our goal is to help health systems deliver on their ultimate promise of delivering whole-person, integrated care.
How to integrate virtual services across a health system
The mistake many health systems make is believing that integrating virtual care into their health system is as simple as having virtual providers available to see patients. In practice, it is much more nuanced. We believe in the concept of “integrating virtual care locally” – whereby the referring provider knows and trusts the behavioral health care team they are relying on, and the virtual team truly knows the local dynamics. This approach is really the only way to build trust and create true continuity of care.
Additionally, the care experience has to be the same whether a patient is part of an Iris program or not. That is why our entire patient journey is built with the idea of integrating into, and leveraging, the health system technology already in place. The Iris provider is integrated seamlessly into the health system and the patient journey feels no different than it would if they were seeing an in-person provider.
The financial impact of integrating behavioral health services
The financial realities of providing behavioral healthcare are undoubtedly a challenge. But, in our experience, it is possible to deliver high-quality behavioral health care and have it be financially sustainable.
We have helped health systems double their behavioral health revenue while delivering a 10% program operating margin. And, study after study shows that providing outpatient behavioral healthcare reduces the total cost of care.
How is this impact possible? It comes down to the disciplined execution of a few key tenets:
First, ensure you’re driving top-of-license care from a true care team approach. Yes, it is essential to have psychiatrists available for high acuity patients, but from our experience, we’ve seen psychiatrists relied on too heavily for patient care than what is clinically appropriate. That is why we leverage industry-leading navigation assessments, with a true care team approach to make sure every patient is seen by their optimal provider with a tailored care plan.
Second, be sure to optimize the operational complexities of care delivery. Patient no-show rates, provider turnover, full provider panels, and consultation with referring providers are all critical to ensuring the program is sustainable.
Finally, revenue cycle optimization is critical. Many health systems are not getting paid optimally for the care they provide and that has to change. Revenue cycle optimization means ensuring the optimal codes are being billed, providers are documenting appropriately, and payers are approving claims. Constant measurement, continuous improvement and dialogue with payers are critical, and can make a significant difference.
It is a reality that if there is “no money, there is no mission,” and therefore we are dedicated to ensuring our programs deliver on high clinical quality and financial sustainability.
The spirit of partnership with Iris Telehealth
At Iris, one of our core values is to suck less every day, which speaks to our commitment to continuous improvement and our journey to excellence. No health system has behavioral health figured out, and no health system expects to be perfect tomorrow. Everyone’s on a journey to be better than they were yesterday. If together we commit to continual improvement, we will make a lot of progress and deliver better care for our communities.
If you’d like to learn more about how we can work together, don’t hesitate to contact us today!
As Chief Strategy & Marketing Officer, Dan Ferrisdrives strategy and revenue growth acceleration by identifying market opportunities and increasing awareness of how Iris can uniquely solve customer needs. Dan brings twenty years of healthcare experience in various marketing, product and strategy roles at Hillrom, CIGNA, Abbott, and Putnam Associates, a healthcare strategy consultancy.
“For many health systems, the emergency department is becoming like an inpatient unit. For organizations that partner with a telehealth solution like ours, patients can be seen by a psychiatrist or a Psychiatric Nurse Practitioner (PMHNP) in less than an hour of when they present to the ED.
“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.”
