Healthcare is at a crossroads. Care teams and patients are caught in a “perfect storm” of shifting government priorities, workforce shortages, administrative burdens, siloed care journeys and rising costs. These pressures compound, leading to delayed reimbursements, overburdened emergency departments and closures, creating greater risk to patients’ lives and straining fee-for-service and value-based care models alike.
For years, we’ve been adding weight to a system already at a breaking point.
- 30% of healthcare spending is consumed by administrative costs — dollars going to paperwork and fragmentation instead of care.
- By 2028, we’ll be short more than 100,000 healthcare workers, stretching an already thin workforce even further.
- At the same time, premiums are rising twice as fast as hospital prices, creating affordability challenges for health plans, providers and the individuals they serve.
Layer onto this the converging behavioral health crisis, where one in five[1] individuals live with an underlying severe mental or behavioral health condition, and the current status quo becomes truly unsustainable. These individuals are ~3.5 times more expensive to treat[2] and nearly 20% more likely to rely on the emergency department[3]. High-need, high-cost populations, such as those with physical and behavioral health challenges, represent a high-priority focus area as an opportunity to target improving whole-person care and driving sustainable financial and care outcomes across the system.
The opportunity is clear: if health systems can integrate care, share real-time data and break down silos, we can collectively change this trajectory.
Bamboo Health’s The Grove Leadership Summit in Charlotte brought together clients and partners nationwide to focus on advancing connected, intelligent care. Leaders explored how collaboration, care journey technology and real-time insights can help reach vulnerable patients sooner, coordinate care more effectively and deliver measurable results for their communities.
Throughout the event, conversations centered on a shared goal: reducing unnecessary utilization, improving outcomes and containing costs while keeping patients and families at the heart of every innovation.
Across The Grove sessions and panels, leaders agreed on three key areas that will define the next chapter of connected care in the year ahead:
- Patient journeys are evolving with the rise of behavioral health needs. Through scalable technology-enabled solutions like Bamboo Bridge®, clients can successfully access unified data and care, improving outcomes for those with mental health and substance use disorders. These patients can often be high utilizers and generate more expensive health costs, but real change is possible when you can intervene with real-time care navigation at clinicians’ fingertips and streamline their coordination workflows. With Bamboo Bridge, organizations can quickly gain insight into patient needs, assess those individuals, perform clinical triage, determine the appropriate level of care and get them to that care as soon as possible. Within Bamboo Bridge, our navigators can match patients to the right treatment provider in their area, follow them through their care journey, close care gaps and deliver improved outcomes. Privia Medical Group Georgia shared promising early results, including reducing 80-day referral delays to just weeks and a 5x increase in patients keeping their first appointments.
- Physical and behavioral health integration is key to successful whole-person care initiatives in 2026 and beyond, regardless of whether you’re in fee-for-service or value-based care. For too long, our healthcare system has treated physical and behavioral health as separate entities. The result has been predictable: fragmented care, avoidable ED visits, coverage gaps and unsustainable costs. While fee-for-service is squeezed by low-margin utilization, value-based care is sinking under uncontrolled, preventable use. Care teams often lack the necessary documentation and insights to secure resources and invest in proactive, preventive care. The truth is simple: the system isn’t working, no matter the model. Integration is the only path forward.
- Engaging partnerships across the healthcare ecosystem is the key to expanding access to care while improving a patient’s overall care journey. Executives agreed that data alone doesn’t improve care; collaboration and deeper insight do. Engaged healthcare networks rely on shared goals and open lines of communication between hospitals, behavioral health organizations, pharmacies, free clinics, social-service agencies, and county and state health departments. Even with technology, it takes a village to deliver the proper care at the right time for high-risk patient populations. Collaboration remains the foundation of progress. One panelist reflected, “I can do things you cannot; you can do things I cannot. But together, we can do great things.”
None of us can weather this storm alone. It requires local and state government health agencies, health plans and providers working together and leveraging technology to successfully change the direction of healthcare.
To learn more about how Bamboo Health can help solve today’s health challenges, contact us today.
[1] https://www.nami.org/about-mental-illness/mental-health-by-the-numbers/
[2] https://www.milliman.com/en/insight/How-do-individuals-with-behavioral-health-conditions-contribute-to-physical
[3] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2707424
