Healthcare Teams Don’t Need More Data. They Need Someone Who Knows What to Do
This blog post is adapted from CEO Jeff Smith’s conversation with Monica Oss, founder and CEO of Open Minds; view the full conversation.
Ask anyone whose family member or friend has lived through a mental health or substance use disorder crisis what that person needed most. They won’t say “more data.” They’ll say they needed someone who was available and knew what to do.
That answer should shape how all of us, including providers, health plans, and state and county agencies, think about care coordination. We have more information about patients than ever. What’s missing is action when it matters.
What People in a Behavioral Health Crisis Need Most
When I talk with people who have lived this, three needs frequently arise:
- Help during the crisis, not days or weeks later.
- A support system that knows a person’s history and follows them from the emergency department (ED) to outpatient care to the community.
- Dignity and empathy. Being understood without continuous explanation. Today, too many people have to retell their story at every new door they walk through, hoping someone finally understands what they need, while their story is documented and fragmented across disparate EHRs and clinical settings.
This is why whole-person care matters. Physical, behavioral, and social needs aren’t separate problems. They’re one person’s life, and they have to be addressed together.
What Happens When the Behavioral Health System Fails?
We tend to picture failure in behavioral health as something dramatic. More often it’s quiet: not knowing where to start, or a phone call that never gets returned.
These failures tend to occur at pivotal moments in care: the points when a person is most vulnerable and most likely to seek care. In this moment, the right response can change the direction of their life. These windows close quickly, but the wheels of the healthcare system move slowly, with responses coming in days or weeks. That gap is where people get lost.
The numbers show how wide the gap is. About two-thirds of primary care physicians report they can’t connect their patients to outpatient mental health services. If an airline lost that share of its connecting passengers, it would be grounded by Friday. In behavioral health, that’s an ordinary Friday.
The human cost comes with a financial one. People with underlying behavioral health conditions have total healthcare costs about 3x as much as those without them.
From Data to Action: Real-Time Care Coordination
We don’t need another dashboard. Data you can’t act on is just expensive wallpaper. What we need is infrastructure that notices a pivotal care moment when it happens and puts the right information in front of the right person so they can act.
Real-time care coordination changes what’s possible. A caseworker can get an alert when a client arrives at an ED. A referral can be tracked until it’s closed, instead of disappearing into a black box. Corrections, housing, and physical and behavioral health teams can share information and work from the same picture.
We’re seeing the results. In Delaware, the state’s Bamboo Intelligence Hub® deployment connects behavioral health, EDs, corrections, and social services into a single workflow. It has processed more than 250,000 behavioral health referrals since 2018 and closed the loop on 75% of them. With Bamboo Bridge®, one large Northeastern health system reduced ED visits by 44% for people with underlying behavioral health conditions.
Talk to us: If your teams are drowning in data but starving for action, see how Bamboo Bridge and the Bamboo Intelligence Hub turn pivotal care moments into timely, coordinated care. Contact our team to discuss what real-time care coordination could look like for the patients you serve.
