Meeting behavioral health patients with timely support, appropriate care, and proper follow-up is essential to their care journeys. Unfortunately, finding the right care isn’t always easy. Between provider shortages, increased demand for behavioral health treatment, and social determinants of health, patients may spend a lot of time waiting for care without ever receiving the support they need.
Bridge Care Services ensures the patients who need care first get care first – while being efficiently directed to an appropriate care plan. Keep reading to learn more about how bridge care enables Behavioral Health Integration across health systems.
Table of contents
Bridge care 101
How Bridge Care Services works
The benefits of Bridge Care Services
Where Iris Telehealth fits in
Bridge care 101
A dedicated bridge care program can help support health systems via a behavioral health integration model backed by clinical and operational expertise to solve common challenges health systems face in delivering ambulatory care in a scalable and sustainable way. This model ensures patients with a behavioral health referral get timely, high-quality care and appropriate treatment and follow-up – all while improving a health system’s total cost of care.
Keys to success:
- Augmenting behavioral health access: Any system struggling with its referral volumes needs a mechanism to augment its clinical bandwidth to reduce its backlog – whether that means optimizing existing resources or leveraging a third-party partner like Iris Telehealth.
- Financial sustainability: Health systems have to maintain financial sustainability for any program to stand the test of time. A bridge care program should be designed accordingly and optimized for reimbursement.
- Care navigation: Clinical recommendations that direct the patient to the right type of care, from the right type of provider.
- Quality Management: To ensure the success of any program, your care team needs high visibility into what’s going right – and what’s going wrong – across your workflows and patient and clinical outcomes. Bridge care leverages clinical support and oversights throughout the care program lifecycle to manage data-driven outcomes and demonstrate clinical and operational impact.
How Bridge Care Services works
There are six components that make up Bridge Care Services and help more people get the care they need.
Here’s how those components work to support health systems:
- Cross-functional care team: Our cross-functional care team of psychiatrists, therapists, and psychiatric mental health nurse practitioners will fully integrate into your health system.
- Clinical prioritization: Referred patients are entered into a risk-stratified patient registry that undergoes a clinical review to ensure the patients who need help first, get seen first.
- Navigation assessments: A Licensed Clinical Social Worker will complete a Navigation Assessment to determine the appropriate level of care.
- High-quality care: Patients referred to Iris will receive the appropriate care plan for their needs. Whether that is medication management, therapy or both – and whether that is short-term care or longer-term care – we ensure each patient receives efficient, quality care.
- Collaborative transition:Once a patient can be safely managed by their primary care provider, ambulatory service, or community clinic – an Iris Care Coordinator helps facilitate a supported transition to the next care setting in the patient’s journey.
- Iris Insights:Your health system will have the backing of Iris clinical and operational excellence to ensure sustainable behavioral health care.
Click here for a more in-depth look at how Bridge Care Services works.
The benefits of Bridge Care Services
With the immense need for care, health systems are overwhelmed. Thankfully, Bridge Care Services can help organizations with the influx they’re experiencing, provide additional support, and continue providing the highest quality of care they’re accustomed to delivering to their patients.
When implemented properly in a health system, Bridge Care Services can help:
- Improve total cost of care
- Deliver optimized Behavioral Health Integration across the whole system
- Support organizational quality measures
- Increase patient satisfaction
- Decrease provider burnout
- Retain patients within the health system
- Keep patients in the referral queue out of the ED
- Support longitudinal care
- Reduce 30-day readmission rates
- Promote referring provider satisfaction
Bridge Care Services helps provide a transformative process for health systems, their teams, and the patients they serve.
Where Iris Telehealth fits in
At Iris Telehealth, we believe patients deserve access to high-quality behavioral health care. That’s why we walk with them throughout their care journeys to help ensure they get the most effective care possible. If you’d like to learn more about our Bridge Care Services program, contact us today.
