He underscored that effectively connecting patients to these services is crucial, as patients directed to services that aren't the right fit for them are significantly more likely to disengage from care long term. To help primary care providers better connect their patients with behavioral health interventions, Intermountain Health is leveraging its wealth of data.
To make use of its clinical data for behavioral health risk stratification, the health system is piloting NeuroFlow's Integrated Care solution. By capturing this data, the tool can help identify and triage risk within primary care workflows, enabling interventions like suicide prevention and crisis outreach.
But Attallah emphasized that the success of an analytics-driven initiative in the context of behavioral health is largely dependent on how these tools are integrated to support provider and patient experience.
"Primary care lives and dies by its ability to have efficient and effective workflows that work for providers," he said, explaining that the first phase of the pilot program is focused on implementing the Integrated Care tool in a way that works for both clinicians and patients.
He noted that the complexities of behavioral healthcare -- such as the need for patients to undergo initial risk screenings and fill out pages of questionnaires and other documentation -- can lead to poor consumer experiences and patient discontinuation of care. On the provider side, workflow inefficiencies and other contributors to clinician burnout can negatively impact satisfaction.
"Data can be amazing, but if the consumer experience and the provider experience is awful, it doesn't matter how good the technology is -- it doesn't get used," Attallah indicated. "So, this first phase is testing, how well does the tool integrate with our system? How seamless is it for consumers? How useful is it, and is it available within the EHR for our providers?"
By focusing on patient and provider experience from the outset, he continued, the partnership is better equipped to effectively utilize the health system's integrated behavioral health data that's been collected over the past two decades.
As an early adopter of integrated behavioral health approaches, Intermountain Health has a well-established, standardized workflow for screening and risk scoring. However, much of this was a pen-and-paper process, creating a wealth of potentially underutilized historical data.
The second phase of the pilot aims to learn from that information, including insights into how historical and existing risk stratification, referral and clinical pathway approaches impacted the likelihood that patients would receive the appropriate level of care at the right time.
"Our goal, in phase two -- once we can make sure that the systems are seamless in terms of the [consumer and provider] experience -- is to create the data inputs to help us collectively learn," Attallah stated. "We want to take the existing data that's in the record to better predict what patients' needs are, so that their inputs are minimal."
Minimizing the number of questions posed to patients could have a significant positive impact on engagement, he underscored. Further, a seamless system that effectively helps providers parse relevant data enables them to better guide or escalate care.
These components have the potential to bolster patient education -- including insights into which behavioral health interventions have benefited similar patients -- and strengthen the patient-provider relationship, both of which are key to high-quality behavioral healthcare delivery.
"All too often, we're so focused on getting [patients] access to behavioral health that we're spending very little time on access to effective behavioral health, which are two different things," Attallah noted. "[Intermountain leadership] learned very, very quickly that we have to start with the patient, and in this case, the provider at the ground level, doing the work.... So, we plan to ensure that those workflows and designs are such that the consumer feels a seamless experience and the provider is not going to a separate system to gather this information."