In his first few weeks as Chicago-based CommonSpirit Health’s new system vice president for behavioral health services, Manish Sapra, MD, outlined his early focus areas: understanding the work already underway across the organization, standardizing clinical care models, and aligning quality benchmarks.
While he said it is “too early” to detail long-term plans, Dr. Sapra emphasized improving access, expanding integrated care models and building sustainable structures to support the system’s mission.
He will lead CommonSpirit’s national service line of behavioral health — a newly established position — alongside his administrative dyad partner with support from physician enterprise, operations, strategy and nursing leadership.
Dr. Sapra’s first step in the process is “to understand all the great work that is already happening across the system.” From there, he will focus on reducing variation and identifying practices worth scaling.
“We want to look at the best practices we have in various parts of our system … and then figure out how we create that cross-learning opportunity and see if those things would fit in other geographies,” Dr. Sapra said.
Quality measurement and forging consistencies across the care continuum are also central.
“We’re going to look at the quality of services … variations in practices … what are going to be our quality standards, and how are we going to report that out, creating benchmarking across the system?”
Partnership management is another area Dr. Sapra plans to structure at the national level.
“We’re going to look into our affiliations and partnerships with external agencies. How do we standardize that? How do we have a national process of vetting our vendors and affiliations?” he said.
Of all the work ahead, expanding access is the area he speaks about with the most urgency.
“I’m really excited about strategic program development, especially in the area of improving access to care, because we have a lot of gaps, and I really want to fill those gaps,” he said. “Where can we build sustainable models that will actually improve access to our patients, both in ambulatory and inpatient settings?”
Although he is still evaluating CommonSpirit’s behavioral health services, he already sees strong examples to build on. Elements of integrated care are not new to the system and have spread across various settings through collaborative care, Dr. Sapra said.
He also sees opportunities for behavioral health to contribute to sustainability.
“Behavioral health can do a lot by improving efficiencies and improving care models. Better care in our acute care settings and emergency departments — that has a financial ROI built into it,” Dr. Sapra said.
Lastly, he expressed confidence in systemwide commitment to behavioral health integration.
“One of the reasons I was drawn into it is that I really believe in the mission. And when they say that they are for their mission, they truly mean it here,” Dr. Sapra said.
