Despite Delaware’s small population size of one million, nearly 15% of the state population (150,000 adults) have a mental health condition and 42,000 have a serious mental illness. We sat down with Michelle Singletary-Twyman, the Division Director of Operations at the Division of Substance Abuse and Mental Health in Delaware, to learn more about Delaware’s current care collaboration challenges and goals.
Q: How does Delaware currently approach care coordination?
A: “We use DTRN360, or the Bamboo Intelligence Hub™, as the care coordination platform that the Division of Substance Abuse and Mental Health Developed in collaboration with Bamboo. Our goal with the platform was to establish an opportunity for providers to have one central location to have data available to them about the clients so that they can help coordinate their care. Currently, people have to use fax and email to get information. The goal was to create a hub of information for providers to be able to have at their fingertips a client’s care journey and what medications they’re on, who their last provider was, and if they showed up to the appointment. All that information is easily accessible, so you’re helping the client to make the next plan for their level of care.”
Q: What criteria did you have for selecting a partner?
A: “We identified Bamboo as the front runner during the process, the entire group, based on the technical plan that they came up with for implementing a project like this. No one has this in place, so we had to create it. We had to find a provider that saw the clinical application, not just the IT application, which was really critical, and for someone to have a plan help us facilitate the consent process that we thought would work with our providers and be willing to work with other providers that might need to be needed, because the platform had to include social determinants of health as well, and we knew that someone may not have everything, but they would need to be able to collaborate with another provider to make sure we have every area covered in the platform.”
Q: Did you have a specific population in mind when improving care collaboration?
A: “The State of Delaware contracts with care teams to provide services for the uninsured. Although our contracts cover the services for anybody that can use insurance, it also we make sure we have the funds available for the uninsured. What we did was strategically track our clients that we already have, so we could identify where they were, and we utilized that client roster to establish the clients that we would get Pings™ on Thanksgiving weekend. Believe it or not, we found that we had clients that were all the way out in Nevada and our act teams are struggling to find people. Lo and behold, some of them were not even in the state. That was groundbreaking for us to go. We’ve got these clients, and we’re looking for them, and they might not even be here, and with Pings, we’d at least know where they are. We just had chills finding that information out, because we had no idea people were moving around like they were.”
Q: How did you envision this program reducing administrative burden?
A: “Remembering as a floor nurse and not having information to care for people who were in a psychotic state and they couldn’t tell you what was going on with them, whether they wanted to share the information or not, and we just had to figure out what they needed, because they weren’t able to tell us what they had had before for medications, or what treatment they’ve been involved with, or if this is the first time they’ve ever come for treatment. Just knowing this is going to help people to get what they need, I would encourage every state to try and adopt something like this. It will help people. It will save lives, and I think people be a lot more satisfied with their work because you can actually do the work you came to work to do.”
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