Leaders at Peoria, Ill.-based OSF HealthCare are building a virtual behavioral healthcare continuum designed to support patients after emergency department visits and connect them to care.
The system has implemented phone- and text-based outreach programs designed to identify behavioral health needs early and connect patients with appropriate services, Dominique Dietz, director of virtual behavioral health, told Becker’s.
Question: Can you talk about your continuum of virtual behavioral healthcare at OSF?
Dominique Dietz: We provide post-emergency department follow-up, so anytime patients discharge from our emergency department who scores moderate or high on the Columbia suicide screening, we provide a phone outreach for those patients reviewing their plan of care. If they do not have a behavioral health appointment established and are wanting to seek treatment, we will help link them. Our goal for that is to prevent repeat emergency departments and link into the outpatient setting.
We also went live in January 2025 with a text based outreach post emergency department discharge for patients who scored no risk or low risk on the Columbia suicide screening in more of a preventative way. Maybe they didn’t show up to our emergency department with a behavioral health diagnosis. We know that going to the emergency department can bring on anxiety and stress for a variety of different reasons, and we are all humans, we all have stress and anxiety at multiple different avenues in our lives, personally and professionally.
Anytime a patient has no low or no risk, we are sending them a well-being text outreach on day two after they were discharged, and just checking in. “We know that you had a recent ED visit. How’s everything going?”
We then do a Q5 screening on them, and through that they’re able to walk through this text-based outreach to understand if they want behavioral health services. We’ll be able to check in and be like, “Hey, are you interested?” [If] yes, we’ll walk through it like this is the definition of individual therapy, this is group therapy, this is psychiatry, this is site testing. “Is this something that you’re interested in?” And if yes, our dashboard is backed by humans. Then we’ll do a human outreach for those patients who are wanting links to therapy.
Then we’ll do more of a formal phone screening and go through their network benefits to be able to refer them. We’ve had great success. We’ve had about a 33% engagement for those patients doing text-based outreach who have no behavioral health diagnosis engaging in this well-being and wanting to either get information on behavioral health or be referred to services.
