Bamboo Health Annual Impact Report ’21

Bamboo Health Annual Impact Report ’21

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.