Building an Innovative and Sustainable Behavioral Health Continuum (70H)

A national crisis exists due to the increasing incidence and prevalence of mental illness within an environment with limited resources, regulatory barriers, workforce shortages and disadvantages in behavioral health economics. This results in hospitals often serving as safety nets for patients in crisis. However, emergency centers and medical/surgical units have not been designed to meet this need and thus do not foster the right healing behavioral health environments, treatment interventions, and can pose strains to the existing workforce that is not behavioral-health trained. The cost of care for comorbid physical and mental health patients significantly exceeds that of patients with only physical health conditions.

It is essential to think innovatively when designing sustainable behavioral health continuums. An effective continuum requires provider, public and payer partnerships. Provider partnerships need alignment of healthcare systems and behavioral health organizations to create noncompetitive service offerings with advanced access for patients. Public partnerships are necessary as many states have bifurcated funding systems for mental healthcare. Public engagement is necessary to make communities aware of resource availability to foster ease in navigation and stigma reduction. Payer partnerships allow for innovative payment structures to ensure sustainability of which bundled payments and value-based metric models are examples. Corewell Health has committed to building and partnering to establish a successful behavioral health continuum. Positive outcomes of this work include improved length of stay for behavioral health patients in hospitals, lower readmissions, reduced utilization of emergency departments and improved health outcomes.