South Jersey Hospitals Launch Collaborative to Improve Access to Behavioral Health Services

On Apr 15, 2015

Five major health systems in southern New Jersey, the New Jersey Hospital Association (NJHA) and the Camden Coalition of Healthcare Providers have launched the South Jersey Behavioral Health Innovation Collaborative (SJBHIC) to evaluate the current behavioral health landscape and provide innovative recommendations on how to improve the system. The year-long project will include engaging key stakeholders, including patients, families and providers in an effort to better identify the challenges they face.

The health systems came together after the 2013 Tri-County Community Health Needs Assessment (Burlington, Camden and Gloucester counties) identified greater access to mental health and substance abuse services as one of the top five health issues facing the region.

To understand the challenges in the current system, the Collaborative will begin gathering data from the five participating hospitals on how patients flow through their network of providers, analyze the data and then apply evidence-based and best practices along with innovative system changes that will better serve individuals with behavioral health conditions.

“Our members are committed to making changes that address the needs of the communities they serve. If it is the intersection of policy that doesn’t make sense, or system issues that challenge the delivery of high quality care, their teams are working on innovative practice changes that will help redefine the behavioral healthcare system as we know it today,” said NJHA’s President and CEO Betsy Ryan.

As part of the Collaborative’s learning process, the five hospital CEOs and their project teams were on hand today to hear James Schuster, MD, MBA, chief medical officer for the Community Care Behavioral Health Organization, discuss his award winning and groundbreaking project, “Optimizing Behavioral Health Incomes by Focusing on Outcomes that Matter Most for Adults with Serious Mental Illness.”

At the heart of this project are 11 community mental health centers of various sizes across Pennsylvania acting as research sites to test two types of wellness interventions: web-based and provider-supported. More than 100 staff members are trained to deliver the models including 78 case managers, 18 peer support specialists (who are or have been patients themselves) and five nurses.

Schuster’s work focuses on the successful integration of primary care and behavioral healthcare and the SJBHIC plans to examine his best practices to see if they can be applied to communities in southern New Jersey.

According to NJHA’s 2013 Acute Care Hospital Behavioral Health Volume Report, well over a half million patients were treated for psychiatric and substance abuse concerns and discharged back into the community. In 2013, 39 percent of the inpatient admissions from southern New Jersey residents had a primary or secondary diagnosis of behavioral health.

Between 2009 and 2013, the number of ED visits by southern New Jersey residents whose primary diagnosis was a behavioral health condition increased by 20 percent, and on average, more than 100 people a day from southern New Jersey come to EDs with behavioral health as their primary concern.

“One hospital and one clinic can’t solve this systemic behavioral health crisis, it operates at the community level. People are not getting the treatment they so desperately need,” said Jeffrey C. Brenner, MD, executive director and medical director of the Camden Coalition of Healthcare Providers.

Related Articles: