More health systems are turning to community-based care to provide mental health services. From partnerships with schools to local law enforcement, these systems are seeing results from integrating services into communities.
1. Renton, Wash.-based Providence’s Well Being Trust partnered with the Emergency Mobile Opioid Team established by the city of Everett, Wash., to deliver peer support, counseling and medication to unhoused individuals struggling with opioid use disorder. In 2025, the team served more than 900 individuals, combining street outreach with accessible healthcare services.
“A lot of the programs and services that can be scaled, even if we are not running those programs, somebody else is. We found that this was a great year for partnerships and collaboration,” Arpan Waghray, MD, CEO of Well Being Trust, said, adding that the foundation has established more than 48 community partnerships.
2. Aurora, Colo.-based UCHealth partners with nine law enforcement agencies across several communities to deliver mental health support. More than 85% of 14,000 behavioral health calls have been resolved without arrest or emergency department visits. Elicia Bunch, vice president of behavioral health, said this reflects the reality that behavioral health crises are fundamentally health issues.
Although the program has shown results, she said models such as these need payer support to be sustainable long term, including for crisis response, mobile services and follow-up care.
3. Nashville, Tenn.-based Centerstone is serving schools through an evidence-based, three-tier school mental health model and embedding full-time providers in the schools, according to Amy Hill, PhD, executive vice president of school-based programming.
She told Becker’s the organization emphasizes tier 1 — supporting the mental health and well-being of all youth and adults in the building. Tier 2 is focused on small group settings and tier 3 provides one-on-one interventions.
In its Missouri operation, there were 1,000 referrals for attendance, nearly 1,500 for subject failure and 2,000 for homeless and transient youth. Seventy-two percent of students with initially elevated GAD-7 scores saw a decrease in anxiety symptoms, and 80% with an initial PHQ-9 score of 10 or greater saw a decrease in depressive symptoms. The average GAD-7 score for children above the threshold declined from 14.1 to 10.1, alongside having a 94% satisfaction rate.
