Identifying ways to address behavioral health needs and improve patient satisfaction in the emergency department (ED) is not only beneficial for your health system, but it’s also the right thing to do for patients.
If there isn’t adequate access to behavioral health services across your organization and within your community, patients may feel they have no choice but to seek behavioral health care in the ED. When that happens, ensuring your ED has adequate behavioral health resources to meet that patient demand can be a substantial difference-maker for patient satisfaction, quality, and even length of stay.
Health systems have an opportunity to help patients get the quality, life-changing care they need and deserve.
By embracing the patient and leveraging virtual behavioral health services to ensure they’re well taken care of during their time in the ED and have a good plan after discharge, health systems are better positioned to retain patients and help them throughout their healthcare journey (even beyond the ED).
54% of U.S. hospitals have no psychiatrist available for ED and inpatient consultation services
In 2022, 6 million people sought care for mental, behavioral, or neurodevelopmental disorders in the ED.
A study from the Mayo Clinic on specialty psychiatric services in emergency departments found the following results:
- 59% of hospitals say they transferred a psychiatric patient to a different hospital due to lack of available services
- Only 27% of hospitals had consultation services available for psychiatric patients
- 54% of U.S. hospitals had no psychiatrist available for medical ED and inpatient consultation services
With the high demand for behavioral health care in the hospital setting, it is critical your organization provides quick access to quality care.
Dr. Thomas Milam, Chief Medical Officer
For many health systems, the emergency department is becoming like an inpatient unit. For organizations that partner with a telehealth solution like ours, patients can be seen by a psychiatrist or a Psychiatric Nurse Practitioner (PMHNP) in less than an hour of when they present to the ED.
From there, we can work with the ED staff on starting or restarting necessary medications or guiding the course of treatment – which makes for a better patient experience and smoother workflows for the on-site care teams.
Across the board, patients report high satisfaction rates with telehealth.
For example, an article from the American Medical Association, cites 79% of patients were very satisfied with the care they received during their last telehealth visit, with 73% saying they would continue using virtual care in the future.
60% of patients said they waited 10+ hours to be seen by a mental health professional in the ED
Today, patients seeking behavioral health support in the ED spend a lot of time waiting and don’t always receive adequate information or resources to support them long-term and prevent them from returning to the ED.
A survey from the National Alliance on Mental Illness found that patients with psychiatric emergencies in the ED experienced the following:
- 60% of patients waited 10+ hours to be seen by a mental health professional in the ED
- 54% said there was no information given to them about prescribed medications
- 65% were not given information about outpatient or community care
Anecdotally, patients also reported feeling very isolated and not taken seriously in their ED experience.
If you’re looking for ways to improve the patient experience, increasing access to dedicated behavioral health services and specialists in the ED is a positive step in the right direction to ensuring patient needs are being addressed.
Virtual care helps reduce the amount of time patients spend in the ED
Patient satisfaction stems from the ability to address specific needs and track progress to ensure important metrics are being met.
On the operational side, having insights into how your clinicians are performing can help optimize care, ensure quality treatment, and help keep patients safe.
Yara Nielsenshultz, RN, MS, CPHQ, Executive Director of Quality
We cannot know for sure if we’re impacting patient outcomes without measuring them. We can think we’re doing a good job (or not), and we can look at the qualitative evidence, which is important and should not be discounted. But, without some quantitative measurement or goal in mind, we cannot be certain of whether we’re making meaningful improvement.
That’s where having a quality management strategy comes into play. It forces organizations to think about what excellent care looks like to identify opportunities to improve, take action, and, most importantly, effect meaningful change.
Through our strategic approach to quality management, we’ve helped our partners reduce the length of stay in their MedSurg units by 0.5 days, increased ED discharge rates from 55% to 62%, and reduced their length of stay in the ED from 12 to 9 hours.
Overall, our partners have seen an 80% improvement in ED throughput by leveraging a strategy that ensures patients get to the right level of care and have the behavioral health care they need to address their specialty behavioral health needs.
Joe Clubb, Vice President of Operations in Mental Health and Addiction Services at Allina Health
As it relates to ED throughput, virtual care has helped us reduce the time our behavioral health patients spend in the ED. Before our partnership, the patients who had the longest length of stay in our emergency departments were our behavioral health patients.
We launched a whole value stream approach, and with help from Iris, we’ve seen the length of stay decrease from 12 hours to nine hours. This 25% improvement has had a big impact on our ED throughput.
Get started with behavioral health integration
Every hospital’s central value boils down to caring for patients and ensuring they’re well taken care of – body and mind. Whether your ED has leveraged virtual before or is looking for innovative solutions that will support patients long-term – there’s no bad place to start.
If you’d like to learn more about how Iris Telehealth can help integrate behavioral health into your organization, please contact us today.
