How Innovista Health Meets Mental Health Challenges in Texas
Serving the mental health needs of Texans poses a serious challenge for state practitioners, who struggle daily to work through access issues, largely due to lack of resources. For the second year in a row, Forbes Advisor ranked Texas the worst state in the country for mental healthcare, while also ranking it second highest in the number of uninsured adults with mental illness. Equally alarming, Texas ranked second highest in its percentage of youth with untreated depression.
Given that Texas also has the third fewest mental health treatment centers in the nation (8.4 per 10,000 businesses), just making timely referrals can be overwhelming – especially for patients in crisis who live in rural areas and need hospitalization. In honor of Mental Illness Awareness Week, Oct. 6-12, we share ways Innovista Health is overcoming current mental health challenges in Texas.
Patients who have the following Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Texas plans (Blue Advantage HMO, Blue Advantage Plus and MyBlue Health), and receive care at Innovista Health clinics, located in Dallas and Houston, automatically are managed by Magellan Health, which provides a list of approved providers for outpatient and hospitalized care. Those who are not in these plans are managed by BCBSTX medical management, explained Innovista Health Supervisor of Care Management Oroma Chukuigwe, IMG M.D., BSc, FSPH. In one case, she recalls a covered patient who had previously been incarcerated and benefited greatly from mental health services as he reassimilated back into society.
Innovista Health also turns to Community-Based Organizations (CBOs) as additional resources. According to Innovista Health Manager of Community Health Services for North Texas Maudia Gentry, Ed.D, MA, BSW, CHW-Instructor, HS-BCP, CBOs are public or private entities that help those most in need and fill in the gaps of traditional healthcare services whether a patient is insured or uninsured.
Collaborating to overcome access issues
“When we opened our clinics, one of our first cases was an 11-year-old boy who’d tried to harm himself and was in need of immediate mental health care,” Gentry explained. “We could not find any place for this child to go to in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. We reached out to the Grant Halliburton Foundation, which provides mental health education, training, and support. Halliburton provided an extensive list of organizations to turn to, and an available bed was identified at Dallas Behavioral Healthcare Hospital,” which accepts patients as young as five years old. Gentry noted that the family also struggled with social determinants of health (SDoH) issues, which Innovista Health documents as part of its primary care services, and the CBOs helped to resolve.
Innovista Health’s Director of Medicaid Programs Charlonda Thrower, LMSW, MBA-HCM, recalls a similar story involving a ninth grader experiencing problems in the public school system. “The family’s provider called us and said, ‘They have to leave their area because they can’t get services, but they don’t have gas to bring their son to the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex for treatment,’” she said. “The mother was afraid her son might harm other children in the home and was told she may have to call the sheriff’s department,” an alternative Thrower deemed “inappropriate.”
Through Innovista’s CBO partnership with Dallas Behavioral Healthcare Hospital, transportation was arranged to transport the youth, and the mother was allowed to accompany her son in the ambulance to the hospital, where he was admitted. Arrangements were also made for her to stay at The Family Place overnight while her husband cared for their other children at home. Today, the patient continues to receive outpatient and family counseling at the Dallas hospital because no resources are available in his rural community. Innovista Health also regularly partners with Assurasource for adult mental healthcare.
Utilizing the services of Magellen Health while also creating partnerships with CBOs to solve mental health challenges is “our playbook to ensure patients get the care they need,” explained Thrower.
Addressing systemic mental health issues
To improve mental healthcare in Texas on a broader scale, Gentry believes Texas needs more funding, particularly to finance mental health services and SDoH support in rural areas. “Funding has been down for a long time, even as behavioral health needs continue to rise,” she said. “We need to bring providers and CBOs to the table to discuss solutions. Payers also need to be part of these conversations.”
Additionally, Gentry said more public awareness is needed on why mental health services matter. “We need to talk about what it is like for patients to be put on an extensive waiting list and not get mental health services when they need it. Or how patients sent to the county hospital in a crisis situation aren’t getting the proper follow-up care after they are released,” which only exacerbates the problem.
Ultimately, raising awareness aligns with Innovista Health’s commitment to value-based care, which brings together a multidisciplinary team of nurses, social workers, care coordinators, community health workers and CBOs to mitigate costs and improve population outcomes.
“Because Innovista Health is also a management services organization (MSO), we are no stranger to building collaborative relationships,” Thrower added. “We remain true to this role in our clinics and across all our business lines, connecting people, services, and organizations together. We can’t do it alone, which is why it is so important to build partnerships to help carry the weight, serving as connectors to the community.”
