Page 14 – Bamboo Health

Public Health Playbook: Planning for a Behavioral Health Crisis Response Solution

Posted on October 6, 2021June 9, 2023 by Grace Keeling

The following is an excerpt from our playbook. To read the full playbook, click here.

The need for coordinated services to help individuals in the midst of a behavioral health crisis is immense. One in four Americans has a mental health or substance abuse disorder, yet fewer than half of adults (45%) with mental health illness receive care each year and the percent of individuals reporting an unmet mental healthcare need rose to 11.7% in early 2021. Meanwhile, suicide is the tenth leading cause of death in the U.S., claiming the lives of more than 44,800 people in 2020 alone.

Whether at the city, county, or state level, the ability to better support crisis management is critical for our communities to connect anyone, anywhere, to the right care anytime. Support for such services is increasing. The federal government plans to launch 988 as the national suicide prevention and mental health crisis hotline in July 2022, and is increasing funding for crisis services—including community-based mobile crisis teams, hotlines, equipment, and training.

Having an effective behavioral health crisis response solution is an essential component for coordinating services. According to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), these systems operate as air traffic control for crisis management services, and should include:

A GPS-enabled mobile team dispatch
Real-time bed registry and coordination
Centralized outpatient appointment scheduling
Performance dashboards to support coordination

Knowing where to begin in developing such a solution, however, can be daunting. To help, Appriss Health has assembled initial steps and key considerations from our years of experience working with states and thought leaders to develop crisis management technology.

ASSESS YOUR CURRENT PROCESSES AND IDENTIFY GAPS

To understand where you need to go, you first need to understand where you are. This step begins with taking an inventory of existing technology, resources, and processes, and evaluating your current care coordination system for crisis response. You should develop a thorough understanding of how local healthcare providers, hospitals, law enforcement agencies, and other entities handle behavioral health crisis cases—including if and how those individuals are referred to care and any follow-up procedures. Ask these questions:

What technology is in place?
What technology should stay and what should go, based on resources and needs?
What systems should be connected to establish an optimal crisis response solution? (CRM, phone center, phone technology, data warehouse, reporting system)

This assessment will allow you to identify what is working well today, and where there are gaps and opportunities for improvement.

DEFINE YOUR OBJECTIVES

Describe your overall public health goals, including the issues a well-designed crisis management solution should solve, the need for the solution in your community (or communities), and the key gaps you will need to fill to achieve those goals. For example, there may be gaps in the current approach to crisis care coordination, the public may lack access to—and coordination with—care resources, or communicating with and dispatching trained emergency service teams may not be part of a technology-enabled process.

To define your goals, you should understand what a successful crisis management system looks like. Download our playbook to learn what SAMHSA considers a successful crisis management system.

Blazing New Trails at HLTH: Bamboo Health Cultivates Care Collaboration to Transform Whole Person Care

Posted on October 4, 2021June 8, 2023 by Grace Keeling

The Bamboo Health team is looking forward to participating in HLTH 2021, which will once again convene an esteemed group of healthcare leaders, government officials, policy experts, politicians, and tech influencers. The event promises to foster a flurry of discussion and insights that will help shape the healthcare industry’s future.

At Bamboo Health, we believe that future focuses on the importance of cultivating care collaboration, everywhere. We’re combining patient data, analytics, and communication like never before to revolutionize healthcare across the country by connecting every payer, provider, and care team member to address whole person care.

To establish this vision, we looked to nature for inspiration. As a symbol of strength, flexibility, and health, bamboo captures the essence of everything we aspire to be. Bamboo’s qualities of resilience, ability to grow quickly, and versatility also describe our company’s ability to adapt and expand quickly to support a rapidly evolving healthcare landscape.

We connect 37 payers and one million clinicians across 50 states, creating one of the most interoperable care coordination networks in the nation. Our solutions and technology platform enable customers to optimize value-based outcomes by delivering information, actionable insights, and support for the delivery of whole person care through payer and provider collaboration. This effort blazes new trails and cultivates care collaboration—giving everyone the opportunity to thrive.

From health systems to pharmacies to state governments and post-acute facilities, we help customers across the healthcare continuum, and those in their care, gain an advantage from greater efficiencies, reduced costs, and improved outcomes by:

Connecting the disconnected, filling data gaps and fostering communication for providers and payers.
Enabling actions that reduce costs and improve outcomes through true interoperability across one of the nation’s largest care collaboration networks.
Informing the uninformed to equip providers with a more complete patient picture and enable better whole person care.

To date, our extensive infrastructure and network support the exchange of applications, information, and actionable insights in more than one billion patient encounters per year across more than 7,800 post-acute facilities, 25,000 pharmacies, 45 state governments, 2,500 hospitals, and 37 payers.

To learn more about Bamboo Health and how we are arming providers with a full view of their patient’s physical and behavioral health to cultivate care collaboration and transform whole person care delivery, visit us at HLTH. We invite you to meet and discuss Bamboo Health’s vision with our leaders, Rob Cohen, president, and Dr. Nishi Rawat, chief medical officer, during the event at booth #1133.

Whole Person Care Requires a Whole Person View

Posted on August 31, 2021February 27, 2023 by Grace Keeling

Looking Beyond Single Encounters and Care Boundaries to See and Treat the Whole Patient

The working definition of whole person care is the coordination of physical health, behavioral health, and social services in a patient-centered manner with the goals of improved health outcomes and more efficient and effective use of resources. What does this really mean for providers and patients?

Today, a picture of a person’s true health is more complex than ever. People are not just the sum of their clinical history or behavioral health conditions – they are the result of a lifetime of behaviors, lifestyle choices, physical and mental health challenges, and their environments. While whole person care is not a new concept, only recently has the perfect storm of opportunity arisen to empower providers to truly practice whole person care at the point of a routine encounter. With the national push for interoperability, the increasing understanding of the importance of a longitudinal patient view, and the value of payers, providers, and government working together in support of patient-centric care, whole person care has started to become a reality.

Connecting the Healthcare Ecosystem

On a national scale, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) has laid out the ultimate goals for healthcare nicely: “The vision is a learning health system where individuals are at the center of their care; where providers have a seamless ability to securely access and use health information from different sources; where an individual’s health information is not limited to what is stored in electronic health records (EHRs), but includes information from many different sources (including technologies that individuals use) and portrays a longitudinal picture of their health, not just episodes of care; where diagnostic tests are only repeated when necessary, because the information is readily available; and where public health agencies and researchers can rapidly learn, develop, and deliver cutting edge treatments.”

Despite this vision of more accessible and complete care, the healthcare industry suffers from a disjointed and siloed infrastructure that makes it difficult for people, providers, and social service organizations to connect those in need with the care and resources they require. Unfortunately, this lack of care coordination is often felt among the high-risk and the most vulnerable subsets of patients, those who suffer from chronic conditions, comorbidities, or mental illness.

How We’re Enabling Whole Person Care

At Bamboo Health, we are singularly focused on changing the potential for whole person care into a reality. We deliver technology solutions that enable the healthcare ecosystem to have insight into and understanding of all the issues that an individual is dealing with to prioritize and coordinate care plans so health outcomes are the best that they can possibly be. The solutions we are delivering facilitate exactly that. No matter who the provider is, no matter what the care setting is, they can look at the individual as a whole person and uniquely coordinate how they are going to care for that patient.

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. 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.

This technology, paired with our expansive national footprint, arms healthcare providers across the country with a greater view into all the conditions that an individual is managing. Not only does this allow for providers to better prioritize and coordinate care plans, but it also ensures improved patient health outcomes—regardless of the provider or care setting. A whole person view that powers whole person care.

PatientPing + Appriss Health: Solving Care Collaboration Challenges to Transform Whole Person Care

Posted on July 16, 2021June 9, 2023 by Grace Keeling

By now, you have probably heard that Appriss Health acquired PatientPing. While we have discussed how this acquisition will improve whole-person care across America, this post expands on that. You can find the original version of it right here, on PatientPing’s website.

We recently announced that PatientPing is joining forces with Appriss Health. We believe that this combination will substantially improve how care is delivered in America—transforming whole-person care.

Why? PatientPing and Appriss Health share the same goal: enabling better care for patients across the physical and behavioral health continuum, improving health outcomes, and lowering the total cost of care. Together, we can help solve care collaboration challenges better and faster than anyone else.

The merger has 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 and state health agencies, and social and human service agencies, among others. Our powerful network serves the largest hospital systems in the U.S., 43 state governments, every national pharmacy chain, the top eight payers, and 7,800 post-acute facilities.

This ultimately enables healthcare providers to better understand all of the issues that an individual is dealing with in order to prioritize and coordinate care plans so health outcomes are the best they can possibly be—no matter the provider or care setting.

What does this mean for you?

Healthcare providers will be able to see historical utilization across acute and post-acute care, flag high utilizers, review controlled substance utilization history with patients, flag substance use disorder risk, facilitate referrals to behavioral health and post-acute providers, and much more. This will help you to collaborate on shared patients across the spectrum of care, solving many of the problems caused by incomplete information and the inability to communicate with other care team members.
ACOs, health plans, and care management organizations will receive data on encounters from the largest, most diverse network of providers and be able to return actionable insights to point-of-care clinicians at virtually all care settings. This helps to efficiently coordinate care in real-time, lowering the cost and improving the quality of care.
States will be equipped to take on public health challenges like never before, with the aggregated data and analysis needed to tackle issues such as the mental health crisis and opioid epidemic.
Pharmacies will be able to better understand the history of the patients they are serving and make better decisions about prescription dispensation.

In short, PatientPing and Appriss Health have created the first-of-its-kind national whole-person care coordination network, ultimately changing the patient-clinician experience at the point of care. This will be transformational—connecting providers across all care settings and geographies to work together to understand the challenges that both patients and providers are facing, improving clinical episodes and care transitions for the millions of patients that interact with the nation’s healthcare providers.

The Ever-Reaching Extent of America’s Mental Health Crisis—and Our Response

Posted on June 22, 2021January 18, 2024 by Grace Keeling

COVID-19 and other factors have increasingly compromised mental health in America, leading to an alarming crisis among our youth and a response from Bamboo Health.

According to a survey conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Census Bureau, over one-third of American adults are experiencing some symptoms of anxiety or depression—a three- to four-fold increase over 2019. The numbers are fairly consistent across demographics, with young adults affected most.

COVID has stifled young adults and children in numerous ways. First and foremost, it has prevented regular, in-person socialization, particularly in classrooms. Second, it—and the media’s justified, yet relentless coverage of it—has caused angst, especially in the malleable minds of our youth. This heightened level of stress can precipitate into anxiety, depression, or worse.

It is worth noting that COVID is not the only factor that has contributed to this crisis. It has been argued that other factors such as devalued parental care and lack of access to care have also played major roles.

Sadly, many hospitals across the country have realized a dramatic increase in emergency department (ED) visits related to mental health, triggering capacity issues and delaying proper care. At Wolfson’s Children Hospital in Jacksonville, FL, over two-dozen children have been boarded in rooms, awaiting open beds in the hospital’s inpatient psychiatric unit. In Colorado, Children’s Hospital Colorado has declared a state of emergency for pediatric mental health.

Mental health issues all too often go hand-in-hand with substance use disorder (SUD). In fact, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, roughly 60% of adolescents in SUD treatment programs can be diagnosed with mental illness, and vice versa.

The worst-case scenario for anyone suffering from mental health issues and/or SUD is suicide, and unfortunately, there are some ominous trends. The CDC has recognized an increase in attempted suicides by teenage girls; ED visits because of suspected suicides rose 51% for girls aged 12 to 17 from 2019 to 2020.

Bamboo Health’s Response to America’s Mental Health Crisis

As you may know, Bamboo Health acquired OpenBeds in late 2019. OpenBeds is a comprehensive behavioral health capacity management and referral technology solution. It is our goal to help states, health systems, and health plans provide access to care to at-risk consumers, combating the crisis and, in turn, improving public health.

Two years later, OpenBeds goes beyond capacity management and referrals, with two different tools developed in response to today’s mental health and SUD crisis.

Our Treatment Connection tool enables the public to seek treatment for themselves or their loved ones in our customer states, in a confidential manner. In each state, we facilitate a network of state-vetted providers who offer inpatient and outpatient services. Between visiting Treatment Connection and being connected to fitting treatment, there are just three steps: searching for treatment, learning about treatment, and expressing interest.

Our Crisis Management module has revamped the way people in crisis are rapidly connected to care. The module expedites access to assessment and treatment for those in crisis, tracks their journey from call to treatment, and coordinates all stakeholders within a crisis management system, including the Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Services, law enforcement agencies, local community organizations, and hospitals and healthcare facilities. A direct link between crisis call center professionals and mobile crisis response teams—all in a user-friendly interface—offers faster responses and treatment.

As Dr. Nishi Rawat, OpenBeds’ Co-Founder and Bamboo Health Chief Medical Officer states, “Over the past year, we’ve been getting more and more requests… to support the end-to-end clinical crisis continuum… the demand for behavioral health services is unprecedented.”

Use Case Spotlight: How Eleanor Health utilizes Pings’ real-time ADT notifications to proactively and promptly engage members and coordinate care

Posted on June 16, 2021June 9, 2023 by Grace Keeling

Eleanor Health provides value-based substance use disorder (SUD) and behavioral health care management services to its 1,000+ community members in over 12 locations across six states: North Carolina, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Washington, Louisiana, and Ohio. Through medications for substance use disorder (MSUD), therapy, psychiatry, nurse care management, and community-based resources, Eleanor takes a whole-person approach that fosters long-term physical and mental health recovery. Eleanor’s suite of outpatient services meets the patient where they are through telehealth appointments, clinics, community settings, and field-based teams.

We sat down with Ben Hall, SVP, Head of Product Strategy and Alex Piersiak, Director of Marketing, Member Growth & Engagement from Eleanor to discuss how their team approaches care coordination in a value-based care world, challenges they face in this endeavor, and how Pings helps improve patient outcomes.

Appriss Health and PatientPing became Bamboo Health in 2021.

What are some of the care coordination initiatives your organization focuses on?

Ben: From day one, Eleanor Health has operated with a mission of treating the whole person, which innately requires the coordination of long-term care in a value-based setting. To succeed at this, we must collaborate with other health care providers like emergency departments, primary care physicians, and inpatient treatment providers. Effective care coordination helps us contribute to what we call a patient’s “recovery capital score,” which is more than just clinical outcomes; it includes their job security, living in a safe environment, and family involvement in their recovery. As a value-based care driven organization, we also take on financial risk at both the individual and population level to drive home our mission of helping people affected by addiction live amazing lives.

Alex: Moreover, we like to refer to ourselves as a medical home that specializes in substance use disorder and mental health. So, it is not just our goal, but our purpose to address addiction, mental health, social determinants of health, and physical health in conjunction with the coordination amongst such efforts.

What challenges has your organization faced in succeeding under these initiatives?

Alex: Timeliness is key. Care coordination cannot happen properly without near real-time follow up because that determines the success of building relationships with our members as well as their engagement in their treatment and recovery journey. From events ranging from an emergency room discharge to something such as a patient’s birthday, it is key that that outreach happens within 48-72 hours in order to truly improve patient care and engagement.

Ben: Plus, it is very time consuming, inefficient, and unproductive to have to work to connect to every hospital or HIE in each of our markets. To get that visibility and scale of a network, especially when you’re growing quickly and operating in multiple states like we are, it’s a non-starter to have to build those connections ourselves for care coordination purposes. We wanted to supplement what we get from our EHR’s connectivity across the nation with other networks that exist, and PatientPing is a one-stop-shop for it all.

How has PatientPing helped play a role in overcoming some of these challenges?

Ben: We luckily started using PatientPing early on in Eleanor’s life as an organization, but before PatientPing, we relied on self-reported medical histories, outcomes, and care events from our patients. The PatientPing platform has proven to us that members typically under report care events, but since PatientPing gives us real-time alerts, we are equipped with the knowledge and insight needed to best care for our patient population.

Alex: We have two teams at Eleanor that actively use PatientPing for different subsets of our member base, and the platform helps each team promptly engage with patients. One team receives Pings (PatientPing’s real-time notification system) for populations that our health plan partners attribute to us based on SUD risk factors or diagnoses, which allows them to proactively reach out and keep recovery services top of mind. That team also uses PatientPing to reach out after a care event to prospective members that were formerly interested in our services, but never fully engaged, in order to see if now is a good time to meet with us. The second team is our nurse care managers that monitor Pings for patients who had an appointment with us in the last 60 days, who we call active members. These Pings prompt the nurse care managers to conduct a wellness check to coordinate care with their primary care physician (PCP) or schedule a follow-up appointment with us if necessary.

Additionally, PatientPing gives both teams the most up-to-date contact information, which can be hard for the population we serve since our patients may have housing instability or call from different phone numbers.

Can you tell us about a time when PatientPing helped you to improve care for a member?

Ben: Our clinic manager received a Ping that one of our members had relapsed, and unfortunately this member had been unengaged in their care with Eleanor for some time. When our staff member reached out, the member told them that they weren’t going to let Eleanor know what happened because they felt ashamed, but they were so grateful that Eleanor reached out to check in. The member felt incredibly cared for and the best part is that this member reengaged in their care with us after we reached out!

The CMS E-Notifications CoP Compliance Breakdown: Large Hospitals and Health Systems

Posted on April 13, 2021June 9, 2023 by Grace Keeling

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ (CMS) Interoperability and Patient Access E-Notifications Condition of Participation (CoP) deadline is rapidly approaching for hospitals and health systems. From the smallest rural hospitals to the largest health systems, compliance with this CoP brings varying levels of complexity. Large hospitals and health systems face a complex web of challenges – from facilitating workflow consistency to ensuring the quality of patient care and beyond. Variables like these, along with the looming deadline for achieving compliance with the CMS Interoperability and Patient Access Rule E-Notifications Condition of Participation Provision, as well as the pandemic, make for a complex situation, especially for CIOs and administrative professionals who often have more robust IT systems requiring added compliance and technical complexity than smaller hospitals.

Given the significance of the new e-notifications CoP, CIOs and compliance leaders should take time to carefully assess the new requirements to ensure they can meet compliance by May 1st. We’ve compiled a checklist of Q&A’s to help guide you through the process. These questions can be used as a resource to help clarify any misconceptions and provide advice for implementing a CoP solution that addresses the unique pain points that large hospitals and health systems deal with every day.

Does our existing relationship with our EHR vendors ensure 100% compliance with the e-notifications CoP?

EHRs have a critical role to play in enabling interoperability to support policy goals. However, like all software, EHRs are limited by their functional capabilities, adoption within and outside the provider community, and delivery/support model. Unlike the CMS Meaningful Use Program, there are no accompanying set of certification requirements or responsibilities imposed on the EHR (or for that matter, an HIE) in order to meet the e-notifications CoP requirements in the CMS Interoperability and Patient Access Rule. The responsibility is entirely on the shoulders of the health system. As such, it is important that health systems sufficiently evaluate the CoP support being developed by their EHRs to ensure that they successfully comply with this important rule.

Our organization is well-positioned to meet the majority of the compliance requirements. Do we really need to field all external requests for e-notifications from community providers?

For health systems with large provider and post-acute referral networks, hospitals must send e-notifications to community-based providers that have established care relationships with patients, including: primary care practitioners, FQHCs, other entities identified by the patient as primarily responsible for their care, and post-acute providers (skilled nursing facilities, home health agencies, etc.). This information is needed for treatment, care coordination, or quality improvement activities. Therefore, identifying which providers have established care relationships is critical and requires that hospitals, or their intermediary, possess the capabilities to collect patient-identified provider information at the point of care; and obtain care relationship information from providers through a patient roster and notification request process. The roster and notification request process allow providers to identify their care relationships through a roster, such as a patient panel or census list, and receive e-notifications based on hospital care events that match to patients on those rosters. Having these capabilities gives hospitals the ability to determine the required set of providers that need notifications, thereby eliminating e-notification gaps that would lead to non-compliance.

We have a large network of providers and access to a significant amount of electronic data. Is this combined with our HIE network enough to ensure 100% compliance with the e-notification CoP?

HIEs can help with e-notifications compliance, but the hospital is ultimately responsible for ensuring the intermediary it uses is a fully compliant solution. Depending on the HIE’s capabilities, post-acute network coverage, and the hospital’s own geographic reach, there might be gaps that need to be filled. Since most HIEs send notifications only within their state or regional borders, they may not have the required dynamic roster or census capabilities developed to service the full range of providers as required by the CoP. These types of limitations would prevent notifications from being sent in real time on behalf of the hospital to all providers that must receive them. With the ultimate burden of accountability falling on hospitals to meet compliance requirements even if they use an intermediary, it is important for hospitals to proactively assess the capabilities of their HIE in order to avoid non-compliance risk and undue exposure.

We don’t want another layer of technology to log into to send and receive data. Can we handle the requirements internally?

The new CoP promotes the adoption of a more comprehensive information sharing solution, which makes it an important step for improving care coordination efforts nationwide. In order to avoid deficiencies on surveys, hospitals must understand and address all requirements. Any gaps in notification sending and routing will need to be identified and hospital leaders must determine whether to address these gaps by building their own solution or by using an intermediary to supplement existing systems. Large hospitals and health systems setting up their own process for handling the requirements internally should plan for a moderate to significant increase in their operating budgets, as it will require a full assessment of current capabilities compared against the CoP requirements. To meet these requests, hospitals are required to manage patient rosters and match patient care events to those rosters, which then trigger notifications. This means that because care relationships can change daily, patient attribution information from rosters will also need to be updated accordingly, which can increase the technical complexity of managing e-notifications. Beyond this, hospitals will need to establish necessary data share agreements between the hospital and the notification recipient to ensure compliance with all federal and state laws and regulations. For large hospitals and health systems, it is also important to consider any updates to workflows, processes, and human resource requirements for establishing this type of infrastructure in order to determine if they can adequately be met. Many hospitals are finding that alternative solutions are often more cost effective and more easily integrated with existing technology – delivering more insight than a manual approach can provide.

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