Danville, Pa.-based Geisinger has opened a new $49 million behavioral health center, a move that aims to keep children and families in the community while reshaping rural mental healthcare access, Vice President of Behavioral Health Dawn Zieger told Becker’s.
Geisinger serves about 1.2 million people in urban and rural communities across Central and Northeastern Pennsylvania. The nonprofit system operates across 163 care sites, including 10 hospital campuses.
The 96-bed behavioral health center will provide inpatient and outpatient services for pediatric, adolescent and adult patients with behavioral health conditions, including anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder, psychosis and post-traumatic stress disorder.
“[The center is] right down the street from our hospital here. We have really easy access to specialists, hospitalists and other medical support, which in a psychiatric facility you don’t typically have,” Ms. Zieger said. “Particularly with children and adolescents, having a children’s hospital nearby is very unique.”
The Danville site will offer recreational therapy to provide patients with the skills and tools to self-regulate. With features such as an outdoor space with basketball courts, walking paths and potential to add gardening and other outdoor activities, the center creates an environment for healing, she said.
The center also invested in Emergency Psychiatric Assessment, Treatment and Healing units, a section of the emergency department created to provide a more therapeutic environment for patients with mental health conditions.
In this space, services such as recreational therapy, peer support, and psychology and psychiatry support are offered in a calm setting separate from the emergency department. In some cases, patients are stabilized and are able to transition to outpatient instead of inpatient, she said.
For patients with behavioral health conditions, the emergency department — with the sound of buzzers and possible roommates — is not particularly friendly to those with conditions such as anxiety, Ms. Zieger said.
The center aims to streamline the process that transfers patients from the emergency department to behavioral health services. With rapid placement at the center, the simplified transition to start a patient’s care journey “makes all the difference,” she said.
“It used to be that a psych patient in the emergency department was there for 10.6 hours after our psychiatric consultation, waiting for a bed,” she said. “We’ve got that down to 3.4 hours, so that individuals are really transitioning into that right level of care much more quickly, and getting out of the hustle and bustle of the emergency department environment.”
The center has providers who have worked in these communities — such as psychiatrists and advanced practitioners — for years. With access to these networks, ramping up access — particularly with respect to the inpatient side — will help to close the gap, Ms. Zieger said.
Outpatient services, on the other hand, are more challenging, with the center receiving 600 to 900 referrals a week and being able to serve about 500 patients. Even with the center’s opening and the providers it has, Ms. Zieger said Geisinger has a hard time keeping up with outpatient demand.
Before the center was built, community members were traveling two or three hours to receive care, Ms. Zieger said.
“We’re taking folks out of their community, and the family is such an important support system,” she said. “So if in Danville, we’re able to have that family in person for discussions about the treatment plan, discussions about discharge and what supports they have. It’s tremendously helpful to be able to keep the kids in their own community.”
Access is key in rural areas; for example Ms. Zieger said one county in the area has only one therapist. Geisinger has invested in the workforce shortage with multidisciplinary teaching programs in many of their settings. In their Northeast facility, Geisinger has a brand new psychiatric residency which helps to retain providers in the communities where there are shortages.
The center will also work in a close partnership with mobile crisis services to place patients at the facility. Instead of doing a bed search and looking across the state, the center will do a quicker job of getting people stabilized, creating a hub for healing to support behavioral health needs.
