The behavioral health sector is under pressure from every direction: workforce shortages, surging patient demand, reimbursement headwinds and the persistent stigma that keeps patients from seeking care. But across the country, health system leaders are finding that technology — deployed thoughtfully — may be one of the most powerful tools they have.
Becker’s asked five behavioral health executives: What technology are you investing in most heavily right now, and why?
For some, the priority is reducing the crushing administrative burden that drives clinicians out of the field. For others, it’s closing the dangerous gap between hospital discharge and the next appointment — a window that has long been a silent crisis in behavioral healthcare. And for at least one system, AI is being trained to do something clinicians have always done by instinct: predict which patients are safe to go home.
Sometimes the most honest answer is also the most revealing. Lisa Durette, chair of the department of psychiatry and behavioral health and program director for child and adolescent psychiatric fellowship for the University of Nevada, Las Vegas based in Paradise, put it plainly: the organization is investing in an AI scribe to maximize productivity and reduce clinician burnout. The challenge is not identifying the right technology, it’s finding the money to pay for it.
“We’re neck deep in grant apps,” she said.
That friction between urgency and funding is a theme playing out across behavioral health systems across the country. The technology and desire to evolve exists in the space but the financing often isn’t, meaning grant funding has become an essential.
At OSF HealthCare in Peoria, Ill., Dominique Dietz, director of virtual behavioral health and her team are tackling one of behavioral health’s most persistent failure points: what happens to patients the moment they leave a facility.
The post-discharge window has always been high-risk. Patients leave stabilized but often isolated, and the traditional follow-up call — a phone ring that frequently goes unanswered — has not been an adequate safety net, she said. OSF’s answer is to meet patients where they already are: on their phones, via text.
“We have already seen engagement jump to nearly 30% through text touchpoints compared to traditional phone calls,” Ms. Dietz said.
Paired with asynchronous cognitive behavioral therapy platforms that patients can access on their own schedule, she said the strategy is dismantling structural barriers that have defined behavioral healthcare for decades: transportation, business-hours-only services and stigma.
“This continuous safety net reduces clinical relapse and prevents costly psychiatric readmissions,” she said. Clinicians, meanwhile, can monitor patient progress remotely and intervene early when risk flags emerge, without adding appointments to an already-stretched schedule.
For Quincy, Ill.-based Blessing Hospital, the transformative technology investment wasn’t a flashy AI application — it was something more foundational: consolidating years of siloed documentation systems into a single Epic EMR platform, Annette Heinecke, administrative director for behavioral health, told Becker’s.
The impact was immediate with patient safety improving and greater continuity of care across settings became possible in ways it had not been before. But Ms. Heinecke’s team didn’t stop at migration, they leaned into Epic’s native AI capabilities to drive documentation efficiency and tighten revenue cycle processes.
“The benefits related to provider efficiency have been incredible, with providers using AI to assist in note completion, as well as ensuring the appropriate billing codes are being selected,” she said.
The result has been a meaningful lift in provider satisfaction — a metric that matters significantly in a field where burnout drives turnover. Improved scheduling templates built into Epic are also helping ensure providers stay productive while patients gain better access to care.
At Roanoke, Va.-based Carilion Clinic, the investment strategy is deliberate: eConsults integrated into primary care offices, online self-scheduling for follow-up appointments, ambient documentation to cut after-hours charting, continued flexibility for telehealth and AI-supported back-office functions to accelerate billing.
None of it, Robert Trestman, MD, PhD, professor and chair of the Carilion Clinic and Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Medicine, told Becker’s, is individually transformative.
“The challenge we all face in technology utilization is, ‘First, do no harm’: We need to be sure that we continue to maintain high-quality care while expanding access and reducing administrative burden,” he said.
The eConsult program alone generates hundreds of decision-support responses that eliminate or substantially reduce the need for formal referral consultations, cutting wait times for patients who can’t afford to wait.
Norfolk, Va.-based Sentara is working on something that could change emergency behavioral health triage at scale: an AI risk stratification model designed to predict which ED patients presenting with behavioral health issues can be safely discharged.
The model has cleared its first major hurdle, Ken Dunham, MD, executive director of medical services for behavioral health, told Becker’s. In comparisons against clinical decision-making without AI support, it has proven at least non-inferior. The research review is ongoing, but the potential upside is significant.
“For a system our size, if it performs as expected, it can potentially save thousands of hours a year in ED behavioral health length of stay,” he said.
In emergency departments already stretched thin, that kind of efficiency gain doesn’t just save money — it frees capacity for the next patient in crisis. Dr. Dunham is deliberate about the process, reviewing the evidence before moving to implementation, but the direction of travel is clear.
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