By Briana Vannozzi
Correspondent
When then-Congressman Patrick Kennedy was pushing for mental health reform, few if any knew he was also a consumer.
“Mental health affects everybody and we have to take away this veil that its just for ‘those’ people,” he said.
That’s because Kennedy — son of political royalty — like many others who are afflicted, didn’t talk about it. His story supports what the five major health care systems in South Jersey found in a special collaboration. Behavioral health treatment is often ineffective, inaccessible and lacking coordination.
“There’s not a medical home for them where they can receive all the care they need so it tends to be episodic care. They’re sent home and then maybe they don’t have access to the medications they should be taking or maybe can’t afford the medications and they return either through law enforcement or through the hospital emergency department,” said New Jersey Hospital Association President and CEO Elizabeth Ryan.
First-year research through the group, called South Jersey Behavioral Health Innovation Collaborative, found that 15 percent of the adult population in the state has a mental illness. In the southern half, these hospitals have seen a 20 percent increase in ER visits due to mental health conditions. Several hundred patients showed up using services in all five systems.
“Which basically meant that they were not getting the right level of followup care. That they were being discharged from one hospital today and tomorrow they would show up somewhere else. So we needed to have a better way to coordinate the care,” said Kennedy Health President and CEO Joseph Devine.
So they’re pledging to share data and create a regional system to track progress. They’ll start integrating psychiatric specialists into emergency departments. So-called super users will receive a care plan, shared among all hospitals with a future shift away from emergency room reliance.
“It’s 7 million patient visits, 1.4 million people brought all the data together from across the region and looked for the subset of costumers that have hit all five hospitals and it’s a lot of work to hit all five hospitals,” said Dr. Jeffrey Brenner, executive director of the Camden Coalition of Healthcare Providers.
Health care leaders say there are too many walls between primary care, substance use, mental health and housing services. The result is, patients end up in the emergency department — where clinicians aren’t necessarily trained to treat them.
“We have a fragmented system both in behavioral health care and physical health care and then thought of putting them together is even more cumbersome, but the fact that we’re doing this is really the key to the future because it’s overall outcomes we’re going to be paying for, not a series of services,” Kennedy said.
“We’re going to have to come up with a new way for these systems to work together. So there will come a day when housing, primary care, mental health, addiction are a seamless system but we are pretty far away from that,” Brenner said.
It’s a major commitment from the five South Jersey health systems. They sum it by saying it will be a problem-centered to a patient-centered approach.