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Summary of “988 is Coming!” webinar focused on the new mental health crisis number and how states are preparing

Posted on by Grace Keeling

For Bamboo Health’s February Knowledge for Good webinar, we tackled a timely topic that will soon impact all Americans. On July 16, 2022, individuals will be able to call or text an easy-to-remember, three-digit number, 988, to be connected with trained mental health professionals at 180+ regional crisis centers. The goal of 988 is for it to be the behavioral health version of 911.  

While the new number will go into effect regardless of any other efforts, many states are using the opportunity to change how they respond to mental health crises to better serve and help their citizens. In the webinar, one of Bamboo Health’s state government market leaders, Alycia Sepe, BSN, RN, helped sort out best practices for 988 crisis implementation, where states stand in readiness, and how our OpenBed’s Crisis Management System is being utilized to help states with their rollout. 

Behavioral health has received more intense attention in recent years in our country, with mental health conditions contributing to grim and staggering numbers, including more than 104,000 Americans who died of drug overdoses in the last year. The COVID-19 pandemic has worsened the mental health outlook while behavioral health treatment providers have been strapped for resources. At the same time, stigma around mental health has decreased, contributing to more people seeking support. 

In 2020, federal legislation passed to establish 988 as America’s Suicide Prevention and Mental Health Crisis Lifeline while the Federal Communications Commission adopted rules to implement the transition with the deadline to implement being July 16, 2022. In the two years since, work began to ready the number itself (i.e., transitioning numbers that began with 988 to new numbers) as well as states passing legislation to help support funding and infrastructure for improved crisis response, particularly as demand is expected to grow, with the goal of meeting citizens’ mental health needs and diverting them from emergency departments and law enforcement to care aligned with their needs.  

According to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), core services and best practices for implementing a crisis response include: 

  • No wrong door access: No matter how the concern comes in, it should be properly rerouted. 
  • Regional Crisis Call Center: Staffed 24/7 by clinical professionals available via phone, text, or chat. 
  • Crisis Mobile Team Response: Trained teams who can respond timely to an individual’s location. 
  • Crisis Receiving and Stabilization Facilities: Short-term observation and stabilization in a home-like, non-hospital environment.  

A successful crisis management system should (SAMHSA): 

  • Standardize crisis care processes and quality 
  • Promote suicide prevention as a core component of healthcare services 
  • Focus on resolving mental health and substance use disorders 
  • Decrease psychiatric bed overuse and eliminate emergency department boarding 
  • Decrease drain on law enforcement 
  • Decrease fragmentation of behavioral healthcare 

But, as highlighted in a December 2021 article in STAT News, “Many states aren’t ready for a 988 crisis line. The deadline is looming.” The author says, “The 988 call system holds great promise for offering all people facing mental health or substance use emergencies the appropriate support, services, and responses to get care and treatment. But that can’t happen until states roll it out effectively. If some states aren’t prepared to roll out 988, or have weaker infrastructure or support for it, the country would end up with a system that perpetuates inequities in mental health access rather than reduces them.” 

Bamboo Health is partnering with several states as a technology partner to meet best practices for their 988 rollout and beyond through our OpenBeds Crisis Management System solution. It provides: 

  • Real-time Impact: Quickly identify and refer patients to the right inpatient or outpatient treatment facility directly from the cloud-based module. 
  • Mobile Dispatch with GPS-enabled Functionality: See the proximity and availability of mobile crisis units, dispatch them, and conveniently communicate a patient’s information directly from the module—expediting the referral process. 
  • Tracking Capability: Track mobile crisis services via GPS on one dashboard and behavioral health services on a second dashboard, providing flexibility for patient referrals. 
  • Bi-directional System to Support a Digital Referral Process and Information Sharing: Avoid frustrating and time-consuming manual processes, make digital referrals, and learn whether a patient is a “Show” or “No-show.” 
  • Data Dashboards with Real-time Outcomes: View clear dashboards with real-time data around crisis call dispatches and response times, referral to treatment and access outcomes, and general use of the system. 
  • Monitoring and Interfacing with a Bed Tracking Inventory System: Connect to providers and organizations in your state and close more treatment loops with bed capacity data from crisis stabilization units, group homes, inpatient SUD treatment programs, opioid treatment programs, and many more. 

Learn more by viewing the 30-minute entire webinar. 

Shaping the Future of Whole Person Care at ViVE: Leveraging Behavioral Health Care Coordination to Close the Gaps in Care

Posted on by Grace Keeling

At Bamboo Health, we believe that the future of the healthcare industry focuses on the importance of cultivating care coordination, everywhere. In pursuit of this vision, we work tirelessly to empower better healthcare for all communities nationwide, which is why we are so excited to participate in the inaugural ViVE event. Merging the leadership of CHIME and the digital marketplace of HLTH, ViVE brings together top thought leaders involved in shaping tech-enabled healthcare and addressing the key issues in digital health innovation. That includes our very own Chief Clinical Officer Nishi Rawat, M.D., MBA, who will be participating in the “Whole-Person Care 101: CH. 1 Behavioral Health” panel session.

Using her previous years of frontline medical care experience as a critical care physician and passion to improve care delivery, Dr. Rawat leads our behavioral health strategy, including OpenBeds and the Crisis Management System which enables mobile crisis response. As a clinician and advocate for investment in behavioral health and crisis services, she has seen firsthand the inefficient manual processes used to locate and refer patients to the appropriate level of care including for mental health and substance use needs. Dr. Rawat understands that clinicians need education and access to better tools to fill this void in order to help their patients secure treatment for their underlying behavioral health conditions and support whole person care.

At ViVE, Dr. Rawat will shed unique insight on the role that behavioral health care coordination and interoperability play in closing the gaps in care. One item driving change nationally is the National Suicide Hotline Designation Act establishing “988” as the three-digit code for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, which goes into effect on July 16, 2022. The switch will create an easy-to-remember number for behavioral health needs akin to 911. Dr. Rawat’s expertise covers the digital infrastructure elements required to facilitate this crisis management process to facilitate rapid referral and placement of behavioral health patients into treatment.

At the center of this change, both Dr. Rawat and Bamboo Health have and continue to work to reinvent and improve crisis management and behavioral health care coordination nationwide. Through the sharing of technology, data, and analytics across behavioral health, prescription drug monitoring, and acute and post-acute care events, we facilitate provider-to-provider communication and collaboration to introduce new levels of visibility for respective care teams – positively impacting the patient’s whole care experience, both physically and mentally.

To learn more about Bamboo Health, our work to support real-time care collaboration, and the progress we’re making against the behavioral health and substance use crisis, visit us at ViVE, March 6 – 9, 2022 in Miami Beach. We invite you to attend Dr. Rawat’s “Whole-Person Care 101: CH. 1 Behavioral Health” panel session on Monday, March 7 from 2:00 – 2:50 ET as part of Track 1 on Getting Personal: Custom-Tailored Care and meet with our team during the event at booth #326.

Want to learn more about the 988 initiative?

  • Find out how the state of New Hampshire is using Bamboo Health’s OpenBeds Crisis Management System to enable crisis call center professionals to do digital intake, complete validated assessments, and dispatch mobile crisis response teams with GPS-enabled technology, in our blog.
  • Join us for a webinar on Tuesday, February 22 from 2-2:30 p.m. ET. Bamboo Health’s Alycia Sepe, state government market leader, will overview the current crisis management landscape, and where states stand ahead of the switch that happens on July 16. Hear how we are working with states to support their response through our technology solutions. Reserve your spot!
  • We’ve prepared a comprehensive Public Health Crisis Management Playbook to answer your questions about “988” implementation. Download your copy today!

Bamboo Health’s OpenBeds Crisis Management Solution helping to support the New Hampshire Rapid Response System

Posted on by Grace Keeling

New Hampshire’s new mental health crisis system launched on January 1 and is already seeing heavy demand, according to The Granite State News Collaborative which published articles about the Rapid Response Access Point in several media outlets in the state, including Business NH Magazine.

Bamboo Health is proud to support the state’s rollout of the 988 initiative – an easy-to-remember, universal number for behavioral health support akin to 911 for physical emergencies – through a multi-year contract with Beacon Health Options. New Hampshire is using our OpenBeds Crisis Management System to enable crisis call center professionals to do digital intake, complete a validated assessment, and dispatch mobile crisis response teams with GPS-enabled technology, when appropriate.

According to The Granite State News Collaborative article, in the first month of operation the New Hampshire Rapid Response Access Point received 4,152 calls or texts for behavioral health support. In addition, there were 564 mobile crisis team responses dispatched within an hour to an individual’s location, facilitated by Bamboo Health’s OpenBeds Crisis Management solution.

Read the full story in Business NH Magazine and also read coverage of the state’s crisis response rollout in:

Want to learn more about the 988 initiative?

  • Watch our webinar hosted by Bamboo Health’s Alycia Sepe, state government market leader, who overviewed the current crisis management landscape, and where states stand ahead of the switch on July 16. Hear how we are working with states to support their response through our technology solutions. Watch the webinar now!
  • We’ve prepared a comprehensive Public Health Crisis Management Playbook to answer your questions about “988” implementation. Download your copy today!

Celebrating Black History Month

Posted on by Grace Keeling

Bamboo Health takes pride in building a culture where every teammate feels welcomed and valued. We embody this culture by celebrating heritage months throughout the year with internal events for Bamboo Health employees. Check out the e-mail below with a statement from Chief People Officer Annie Edwards about what Black History Month means to us as an organization.
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Today begins the celebration of Black History Month!  For 28 days, we reflect on and recognize the many contributions Black people have made to our country and the world.

Black History Month was first introduced as “Negro History Week” by Carter G. Woodson and his organization known today as the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH). The ASALH organized the first celebration of “Negro History Week” in 1926 by encouraging schools and communities across the nation to host celebrations, lectures, and establish history clubs. By the late 1960s, “Negro History Week” evolved into Black History Month on college campuses and was officially recognized in 1976 by President Gerald Ford.

This year’s theme, “Black Health and Wellness” aligns perfectly with our mission and vision of improving healthcare for all. Black people have made great contributions to healthcare in the U.S. Dr. Daniel Hale Williams performed the first successful open-heart surgery in 1893 and Dr. Charles Richard Drew was a pioneer for blood plasma research and the development of blood banks.

Black Health and Wellness doesn’t just focus on traditional methods of care such as primary care or ER visits, but also mental and emotional health. Through our solutions we can have meaningful impact for communities of color across the nation coordinating care and improving healthcare for all.

This month you will have opportunities to learn, experience, and celebrate some of the contributions Black people have made throughout history.

•            Black History Month BINGO
•            The Music of Changemakers
•            How We Become Free: A Black History Meditation

And for other ways you can get involved this month check out the following resources and organizations:

•            Black Health and Wellness Resources
•            Resilient Coders
•            Hack Diversity
•            Blacks in Technology

Annie Edwards

Bamboo Health Annual Impact Report ’21

Posted on by Grace Keeling

In 2021, Appriss Health + PatientPing Became Bamboo Health to Enable Better Care for Patients Across the Physical and Behavioral Health Continuum

Appriss Health was focused on delivering important, actionable patient data and analytics to clinical workflows, while PatientPing was focused on providing real-time alerts around care events. Today, Bamboo Health—a name which reflects bamboo’s strength, flexibility, and growth in nature—is focused on those same things, but also on creating one of the largest and most diverse care coordination networks in the country. In 2022, we look forward to continuing to build this network and empower payers and healthcare professionals to collaborate for the sake of better whole person care and lower costs.

Common benefits of care coordination include lowering emergency department utilization, preventing hospital readmissions, reducing unnecessary procedures and tests, decreasing medication errors, and treating physical and behavioral health conditions more holistically.

“We’ve spent the last eight years trying to change the face of healthcare in this country… we’re going to provide the data, the insights, the functionality, and the support to enable providers to coordinate care across health systems, across geographies, in real-time, and at the point of care like never before,” said Bamboo Health CEO Rob Cohen.

With customers in all 50 states, Bamboo Health is currently serving:

  • 2,500+ hospitals
  • 7,955 post-acute facilities
  • 25,000 pharmacies
  • 32 health plans
  • 45 state governments
  • Over one million acute and ambulatory providers

43 of the nation’s 54 prescription drug monitoring programs (PDMPs) rely on Bamboo Health’s software solutions, including:

  • 1,090,000+ healthcare providers accessing PDMP information in workflow
  • 145,000+ facilities integrated nationwide
  • 106,000,000 patient encounters per month, with controlled substance insights delivered directly into electronic health records (EHRs) and pharmacy management systems

While Bamboo Health wasn’t formally introduced until August 31, 2021, we accomplished quite a bit and reached several milestones over the last year.

Fighting America’s Opioid Epidemic

The U.S. is experiencing a behavioral health epidemic exacerbated by the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, which is spiking substance use disorder (SUD) rates. November 2021 provisional data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics found that drug overdose deaths rose by nearly 29% over a 12-month period ending in April 2021, to an estimated 100,306. Opioids remain the leading cause of drug overdose death, accounting for more than 75% of deaths during the time frame.

To make matters worse, behavioral health providers are struggling to keep up with surging patient demands. At the same time, we are seeing increased awareness of behavioral health needs and SUD treatment that is helping to decrease stigma. Those two forces have led to more people seeking care; however, affordable, quality care is often hard to find.

This dynamic is more evident in Delaware than in any other state. With the nation’s second-highest drug overdose mortality rates, Delaware’s Division of Substance Abuse and Mental Health needed a referral system that encompassed the entire continuum of behavioral health services. The Delaware Treatment and Referral Network (DTRN), powered by Bamboo Health’s cloud-based OpenBeds platform, now facilitates rapid referrals and fosters collaboration among mental health, SUD, and medical providers.

The State of Delaware has realized remarkable results:

  • As 2021 came to a close, the DTRN hit an outstanding new milestone: 100,000 referrals. This represents 100,000 opportunities to improve the lives of citizens.
  • By assisting providers with the onboarding process to encourage adoption, Delaware expanded the number of active users in its referral network by 264% in the first year. The variety of distinct services offered by receiving organizations expanded in the first year as well, growing from 40 to 109—a 173% increase.

Efficiently Managing Patient Populations

Another growing issue is the inability of healthcare organizations to track their patients in order to make the most informed medical decisions. We’re changing this with our Pings solution, which offers real-time notifications when patients experience care events.

Monarch is a North Carolina statewide provider of comprehensive specialty mental health and human services that serves 28,000 patients with intellectual and developmental disabilities, mental illness, and SUDs.

In 2018, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration Center for Mental Health Services awarded Monarch a Certified Community Behavioral Health Clinics (CCBHCs) Expansion Grant, designed to provide patients access to health services including 24/7 crisis intervention. As a result, Monarch needed the ability to follow up with patients in a timely manner and provide coordination with other care providers.

With only four months to comply with the requirements needed to become a CCBHC, they turned to Bamboo Health. Since 2019, Monarch has leveraged our Spotlights solution for interactive, real-time dashboards of high-priority performance metrics to track operational trends. They also began a 1,500-patient trial of our Pings solution. After the initial one-year implementation, Monarch expanded their partnership 10-fold with Bamboo Health to cover all 28,000 lives with Pings.

With Pings, care managers at Monarch receive real-time alerts when their patients are hospitalized, allowing them to check on the patient, pass along valuable information to the care team, and schedule post-discharge appointments and follow-up care.

Looking Ahead to 2022

As we mentioned, our main goal in 2022 is to grow our behavioral health care coordination (BHCC) network. We have thousands of organizations and over one million healthcare professionals in the network, but we envision connecting all payers, providers, and even patients across America. And we envision a new level of collaboration between primary care physicians, specialty providers, and health plans to reduce care costs, and ultimately, improve outcomes for the delivery of whole person care.

To borrow a few more words from Rob, “True care collaboration is at the heart of our company’s vision, as it’s one of the most powerful tools to help improve outcomes and reduce unnecessary encounters and costs. To us, true care collaboration means delivering comprehensive, actionable insights to all care settings, providing workflow tools to enable clinicians to intervene, and supporting clinicians in providing holistic care… Not only does this allow for providers to better prioritize and coordinate care plans, but it also enables improved patient health outcomes—regardless of the provider or care setting.”

For more on fighting the opioid epidemic and efficiently managing patient populations, and additional information about our accomplishments and goals, read our full 2021 Annual Impact Report.

Webinar Recording: What’s Next for E-Notifications?

Posted on by Grace Keeling

The deadline to comply with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Interoperability and Patient Access Rule Electronic Event Notifications Condition of Participation was May 1, 2021. In short, the rule requires hospitals to send admission, discharge, and transfer (ADT) notifications to patients’ other healthcare providers. The intent was to promote care coordination and value-based care, but for some, the rule has meant more work and red tape, while resources are low in part due to the continuing pandemic.

Bamboo Health’s Manager of Government Affairs breaks down the current implications of the rule as well as what it could forecast for the future of healthcare interoperability. Plus, we’ll help navigate CMS’s Interpretive Guidance for the rule, particularly regarding what hospitals need to know about “reasonable effort” and “making every attempt possible” to achieve compliance.

Coordinating Behavioral Healthcare for a Healthier America

Posted on by Grace Keeling

Uncoordinated behavioral healthcare has cost America money, and more importantly, lives, for far too long. Today, we’re working to fix it.

Seemingly forever, patients’ medical records have been scattered about, first in paper files on office shelves and now on servers in data centers. To get one record from here to there—and to get it in the hands of the right clinician at the right time—has been a logistical nightmare. Picture a long chain, but with a missing link.

Today, this problem translates to an array of measurable issues for all of healthcare, two of which are most crippling: high, often unnecessary costs and compromised care. These issues are a direct result of primary care physicians (PCPs), specialists, and other care team members, along with insurers, being unaware of their patients’ whereabouts on the care continuum—particularly, the behavioral care continuum—and unable to effectively manage their care.

To illustrate the magnitude of the cost issue, the Journal of the American Medical Association, or JAMA, estimates that the “total annual costs of waste were $760 billion to $935 billion” in one year. That’s nearly one trillion dollars in unnecessary care, or nearly one quarter of the total annual healthcare spend in America. This plagues patients and their insurers and hinders value-based care efforts.

As for compromised care, consider the high utilizer who repeatedly visits the emergency department (ED), or the individual with a behavioral health disorder who is admitted to a treatment facility, both without their PCP’s knowledge. This leads to less communication between their PCPs and specialists, which can result in inefficient administration of medication, procedures, and tests, a lack of timely follow-ups, and even harm.

State health departments, health information exchanges, and other entities have long worked to consolidate, secure, and share relevant patient information on a large scale. While they have certainly made progress and will continue to play a major role moving forward, they operate in a somewhat fragmented environment and don’t necessarily foster communication among providers and between payers and providers. In addition, behavioral health and crisis event data remain siloed at a time when access to such data is more important than ever amid a worsening opioid epidemic.

A recent study on healthcare coordination conducted by researchers from the Commonwealth Fund highlighted this problem. “Compared to physicians in other countries… U.S. physicians did not routinely receive timely notification or the information needed for managing ongoing care from specialists, after-hours care centers, EDs, or hospitals.” Furthermore, “Ensuring the continuity of care delivered in settings outside the four walls of a primary care practice, but with the involvement of primary care through timely information exchange, is a central prerequisite for coordination.”

This is precisely why Appriss Health + PatientPing became Bamboo Health. We combined a company defined by data and analytics and another defined by real-time information sharing for the improvement of care coordination.

“We have created one of the largest and most diverse care collaboration networks in the country, connecting nearly one million healthcare professionals in all 50 states and virtually all care settings including primary and specialty care, emergency departments, urgent cares, inpatient facilities, skilled nursing facilities, post-acute facilities, behavioral health treatment centers, pharmacies, home health agencies, state health agencies, and social and human service agencies, among others,” said Rob Cohen, Bamboo Health’s President and General Manager. “Our powerful network serves the largest hospital systems in the U.S., 45 state governments, every national pharmacy chain, 37 payers including the top eight health plans, and 7,800 post-acute facilities.”

As Rob alluded to, we’re here to coordinate behavioral healthcare by growing one network on one platform. By connecting PCPs with specialists, payers with providers, and behavioral health with physical health. By fostering communication with data, analytics, and real-time alerts. And by keeping the patient at the center. It’s coordinated care that can reduce costs and save lives.

We’re the missing link in the chain. And we’re just getting started.

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