Page 15 – Bamboo Health

Three Key Takeaways from HLTH 2021: Driving Change through Care Coordination to Transform Whole Person Care

Posted on October 28, 2021June 9, 2023 by Grace Keeling

Bamboo Health recently had the pleasure of exhibiting at HLTH 2021, which served as the first opportunity to unveil our new company brand in person since launching in late August. HLTH also provided a great chance for our team to participate in important discussions with an esteemed group of healthcare leaders, government officials, policy experts, politicians, and tech influencers. Below is a summary of the three key takeaways from our discussions that will help to shape the healthcare industry’s future.

1. Care is Moving Beyond Hospital Walls

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, older adults are expected to outnumber children in population size by 2034, with 65-year-olds and over projected to number 77 million, which comes as no surprise as the Baby Boomer generation continues to age. As a result, the home healthcare industry represents one of the fastest expanding industries in all of healthcare. The Home Care Benchmarking Study by Home Care Pulse projects that in 2021, there will be approximately 9,000 more home care agencies than there were five years ago. This follows 2020, a year in which U.S. home care spending reached an all-time high of $113.5 billion.

COVID-19 has accelerated this trend, making it more acceptable for people to seek accessible and affordable care options. Beyond home healthcare providers, points of access now include retail clinics, behavioral health clinics, and community centers. As the population continues to age and patients increasingly choose to remain in their homes, the boundaries of clinical capacity will continue to extend beyond traditional physical and geographic lines.

2. Consumerization of Healthcare

Adding to the growth of home healthcare, it’s never been clearer that how we access healthcare is changing. In the past, when we got sick, we all traveled a similar patient journey utilizing primary care providers or hospitals; however, that paradigm has shifted. Patients increasingly prefer to receive convenient care via today’s technologies.

From telehealth options to at-home testing kits to remote monitoring systems to primary care in retail pharmacies, these developments, along with increased public openness to receiving new methods of care, have forced providers to partner with tech companies on solutions. This shift in how we access care has the potential to enable a more personalized, cost-effective, value-based care delivery model.

3. Value-Based Care is Here to Stay

While there have been numerous changes to the value-based care landscape over the last few years, the acceleration toward value-based care models is still hot. This is partly due to the emphasis that federal and private payers have placed on increasing access to care and lowering total cost of care. And this underscores the importance of products and services that put the patient’s whole care experience first. Through effective care collaboration about patients’ care encounters across the physical and behavioral health spectrums, care teams gain new levels of visibility to improve care quality, reduce total cost of care, and minimize post-acute spending and unnecessary emergency department visits.

Bamboo Health solutions enable just that by supporting one, connected network—all with care coordination and total cost of care top of mind. For example, we recently announced that Bamboo Health’s national network of Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) generated over $1 billion in total shared savings in 2020 under the Medicare Shared Savings Program (MSSP). Bamboo Health’s ACO partners achieved this success in the value-based care program by utilizing our Pings solution, which provides real-time visibility into patient admission, discharge, and transfer (ADT) care events. Pings enables ACOs to identify high-utilizers, monitor post-acute length-of-stay, and apply timely interventions to reduce emergency department to inpatient conversions.

The Future of Healthcare

In closing, we are encouraged by the positive input and feedback that we received at HLTH. The event provided a refreshing reminder that innovation in the healthcare industry—and transformational change—is well on its way.

At Bamboo Health, we believe the key to better care rests in ensuring that all participants in the care continuum have access to real-time patient data and the ability to coordinate and collaborate with other providers. Whether patients are at home or utilizing the latest technologies to meet their needs, real-time information provides clinical intelligence to successfully prioritize and deploy services and ensure seamless care transitions, while also creating optimal opportunities to deliver on the promise of value-based care.

We look forward to leveraging this positive momentum as we continue our work creating one of the most comprehensive, diverse care collaboration networks in the country.

Webinar: The Power of Pings: How a Statewide Mental Health Provider Tracks and Manages its Patient Population

Posted on October 15, 2021June 9, 2023 by Grace Keeling

Recently, we presented a webinar: The Power of Pings: How a Statewide Mental Health and Human Services Provider Tracks and Manages its Patient Population with Real-Time Notifications. The webinar was a joint effort between Bamboo Health and our customer, Monarch. Since 1958, Monarch has provided the state of North Carolina with comprehensive specialty mental health and human services; Today, they serve 28,000 patients. They pride themselves on providing a nurturing environment for people with intellectual and development disabilities, mental illness, and substance use disorders. You can learn more about Monarch, here.

Over the past few years, Monarch experienced a growing challenge: the ability to efficiently track and effectively manage their patient population. With Monarch’s growth came a more diverse patient population, based on geographic area, medical history, type of insurance, and more. Additionally, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration Center for Mental Health Services awarded Monarch a Certified Community Behavioral Health Clinics Expansion Grant. While the grant provided opportunity, it also set strict regulations related to patient care coordination.

To answer this challenge, Monarch partnered with Bamboo Health to implement Pings, which delivers real-time notifications to care team members when their patients experience care events across the continuum. Pings helped Monarch become more informed on both a broad scale and provider-level scale.

Monique Lucas, vice president of integrated care at Monarch, had this to say, “After about a year with Pings, we realized the value that it brought. We were able to utilize the data to build dashboards that gave us a clearer picture of what we were dealing with and how to handle our hospitalization population.”

To hear much more from Monique about how Pings revamped Monarch’s healthcare coordination efforts, check out our webinar recording.

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.”

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