Massachusetts Taps Health IT to Drive Behavioral Health Care Coordination

The Executive Office of Health and Human Services (EOHHS) of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts has awarded health IT vendor PointClickCare Technologies a contract to implement a behavioral health treatment and referral platform.

The platform will facilitate admission to the next appropriate care steps for patients awaiting disposition in emergency departments (EDs) related to behavioral health.

Acute and psychiatric hospitals, health insurance carriers, and state agencies, including the Department of Mental Health and MassHealth, the Massachusetts Medicaid program, will use the platform.

“We are pleased to have found a technology partner who can streamline communication, address potential administrative burdens on our providers, and who is familiar with EOHHS’s Expedited Psychiatric Inpatient Admission Protocol,” Emily Bailey, chief of the Office of Behavioral Health at MassHealth, said in a public statement.

“We selected PointClickCare because we are confident the team shares our vision for an automated, centralized platform to empower our stakeholders with all the information necessary to facilitate care for patients in need of acute behavioral health services,” Bailey continued.

The platform will automate behavioral health referral screening, evaluation, and referral processes. Further, it will enable the electronic exchange of standardized admissions information to create a real-time view of patients seeking behavioral health treatment.

The tool aims to help hospitals reduce time spent in the ED and reduce lengths of stay for patients needing behavioral healthcare, particularly inpatient care.

Additionally, providers will receive critical information for care coordination, and stakeholders will be able to identify trends and patterns regarding ED utilization for policy purposes.

“We know the mental health crisis is still on the rise. Recent data from the Massachusetts Health & Hospital Association found that there are between 500-700 patients boarding in acute care hospitals each day as they await inpatient BH admission,” said Brian Drozdowicz, SVP & GM of acute and payer markets at PointClickCare.

“Our robust network in Massachusetts, including 94 percent of the acute network and 69 percent of the skilled nursing network, puts us in a unique position to enable hospitals, health plans, and state agencies to identify patients in EDs awaiting care in places such as inpatient psychiatric treatment and improve those patients’ outcomes,” Drozdowicz added.