How proactive leaders can turn behavioral health chaos into opportunity
Think about a realistic scenario where a regional health system loses half its pediatric behavioral health providers in one year. The remaining clinicians suddenly inherit hundreds of patients from colleagues who departed, doubling their caseloads overnight. Meanwhile, parents with children in crisis continue bringing them to clinics for diagnosis and care, seeking psychiatric care from a system already stretched to its limit.
The CEO faced an impossible choice: Accept new patients and watch the remaining clinicians burn out, or pause new intakes and abandon children in crisis.
When organizations choose the latter, desperate families often turn to emergency departments (EDs). This point of care is significantly more expensive for both patients and health systems while consuming critical ED resources meant for medical emergencies. It also focuses on crisis stabilization rather than long-term treatment planning, making it generally less effective for ongoing behavioral health needs. For families, this means hours-long waits just to receive basic treatment.
The Problem: Converging Crises in Workforce, Policy, and Funding
Healthcare leaders are at the center of a storm that has been gathering strength over the past few years. The labor shortage has persisted for decades, but the surging demand for healthcare is creating a problem that can’t be solved by maintaining the status quo.
Funding is under fire as policy changes are set to cut Medicaid spending by over $900 billion, leaving millions with mental illnesses at risk of losing access to care. Reimbursements are also low, since CMS implemented a 2.93% reduction in Physician’s Fee Schedule (PFS) for this year.
In our webinar on navigating this perfect storm, Dawn Zieger, Andy Flanagan, and I all agreed that each crisis on its own is enough of a challenge. But combined, they create a volatile situation that leaves children without the care they need. A “wait and see” approach keeps orgs treading water, struggling to grasp creative solutions for navigating the chaos.
The Impact: Consequences of the Status Quo
This reactive approach creates a cascade of consequences that compound over time:
- System inefficiency and provider burnout accelerate care gaps.
Providers experiencing burnout provide lower-quality care. That can show up in delays in diagnoses, medical errors, and fragmented care, creating care gaps that providers don’t have the capacity or resources to fill.
- Reactive cost-cutting leads to poorer patient outcomes.
Increasing shift times and/or pausing intake can seem to help in the short term. But over time, care gaps expand and patient outcomes deteriorate. Creating a disconnect between different service arms (e.g., primary care and behavioral health) allows children to fall between the cracks.
- Market lag for organizations that fail to innovate early.
A reactive approach leaves you playing catch-up with competitors and prevents you from innovating a solution. The ripple effect expands into hiring options, workplace culture, profitability, and beyond.
The Solution: Turning Chaos into Strategy
The current model of hiring new mental health providers and assigning cases until they’re at capacity is unsustainable. Telepsychiatry helps transform this outdated approach, and when integrated with primary care, empowers whole-person care. The flexible schedules also help clinicians balance their work-life dynamic, leading to better care and patient outcomes.
Whether integrated into primary care clinics or deployed in emergency departments, telepsychiatry transforms care delivery by providing 24/7 access to specialists without requiring patients to travel or wait for scarce in-person appointments.
Forward-thinking health systems are also now using predictive analytics and risk stratification to identify their most vulnerable populations before crises peak. From our survey of 1,000 adults in the U.S., we found that nearly half (49%) say they would use AI tools to automatically monitor their mental health without clinical intervention. But 73% say human providers should make the final decision. Leaders can use data-driven insights to identify potential behavioral health risks and come up with targeted solutions that work for everyone.
This is how leaders build resilience. By thinking outside the box and using technology to expand care while easing the burdens of the workforce.
Iris POV: Building Resilience Systematically
At Iris Telehealth, we know that managing the complexities of care can be overwhelming for leaders. It’s why we partner with health systems nationwide to help executives design scalable behavioral health infrastructure.
Our Virtual Clinic is a great example of a systemic, proactive approach. We integrate with our partners’ existing health systems to provide targeted behavioral health support that works hand-in-hand with primary care. Our partners can serve more patients without breaking the budget and causing burnout.
We don’t take a first-come, first-served approach. Instead, our team of clinicians, therapists, and nurse practitioners evaluates patients to offer care in order of who needs it most. In just six months, we’ve helped reduce referral backlogs by 83% and optimized reimbursement by diverting 40% of psychiatry referrals to more cost-effective levels of care.
Iris equips leaders with tools to stay ahead of the curve — not just survive the storm. The organizations that survive will be helmed by leaders who transform fragmented care into integrated, financially sustainable systems.
Ready to build resilience? Contact us to learn more.
