From emergency departments to pediatric units, health systems are increasingly turning to virtual care to address behavioral health access. Leaders are leveraging digital tools to expand capacity, help reduce unnecessary admissions and connect patients with treatment faster.
Chesterfield, Mo.-based Mercy is among the systems scaling this approach. The organization has built a virtual behavioral health division spanning four states, serving 35 hospitals and delivering psychiatric intervention to patients in crisis.
Through an interdisciplinary team — including master’s degree-level licensed clinicians, advanced psychiatric nurse practitioners and psychiatrists — Mercy provides 24/7 virtual behavioral healthcare across emergency departments and other units within the hospital.
“There’s really no place within those 35 hospitals that we cannot care for a patient … emergency departments, medical floors, ICU environments, pediatric areas and women’s health areas,” Patty Morrow, vice president of behavioral health services, told Becker’s.
The impact has been significant. Mercy is able to discharge 30% to 35% of behavioral health patients who present to the emergency department in crisis. By contrast, she said hospitals without such interventions see nearly 95% to 100% of these patients being admitted to behavioral health beds.
Eighty-five percent of this care is delivered through virtual solutions, Ms. Morrow said.
“Last year, we served 37,000 people through that department, and most of those individuals are people that would have never had access to a behavioral health specialist or a psychiatric nurse practitioner, or a psychiatrist,” she said.
Other systems are seeing similar gains by introducing digital therapeutics.
Peoria, Ill.-based OSF HealthCare is using digital tools to support patients with mild to moderate behavioral health needs, Dominique Dietz, director of virtual behavioral health, told Becker’s.
Through its use of the SilverCloud platform — an internet-based cognitive behavioral therapy tool — patients have seen more than a 50% improvement in PHQ-9 scores.
On average, patients participate in eight-week sessions lasting 30 to 45 minutes. They also report about a 45% improvement in general anxiety disorder assessments, or GAD-7 scores, alongside a 94% satisfaction rate.
A literature review found internet-based cognitive behavioral therapy to be a cost-effective treatment and management approach for anxiety and depression.
Meanwhile, St. Louis-based SSM Health is leveraging telehealth to manage rising demand in the emergency department, where behavioral health boarding remains a challenge.
“That has been a little bit of a challenge for us, because the emergency department is becoming so overloaded,” Becky Dvorak, MSN, RN, regional vice president of behavioral health, told Becker’s. “There are days where we can have 10 to 15 patients sitting in the ED waiting on an inpatient psych bed.”
To ease capacity constraints, SSM initiates treatment while patients are still boarding. Nurse practitioners and psychiatrists evaluate patients via telehealth and begin medication when appropriate. While psychiatric medications do not provide immediate relief, earlier intervention can improve outcomes.
“Without telehealth, we wouldn’t be able to do the amount of consultations that we do. At DePaul alone, there were around 3,700 consults last year,” Ms. Dvorak said, referring to the 124-bed location, the largest behavioral health platform in the system.
