The 2023 Healthcare Marketing & Physician Strategies Summit (HMPS23) took place April 17 to 19 in Austin, Texas. Now in its 28th year, the conference aims to help healthcare marketing and strategy executives think through the toughest challenges related to brand recognition, referral and data management, recruiting, patient experience, and population health management in the evolving digital marketplace.
I had the privilege of moderating a session titled “Mental Health: A Call to Action.” A panel of experts—Hani Talebi of Meadows Mental Health Policy Institute, Aaron Novotny of Arkansas Blue Cross Blue Shield, and Chris Hemphill of Woebot Health—brought their collective clinical, policy, economic/payer, and digital health perspectives to a highly interactive discussion mental and behavioral health (MBH).
A Personal Investment
One of the most impactful moments from our session occurred at the beginning, when audience polling revealed that 65% of the attendees were there not just for business purposes but because they had a personal reason or interest in behavioral health. It was a telling moment; this is a topic that elicits a deeply personal response from people, and that collective personal response is what will help drive innovation and change nationally.
With that as the backdrop for the session, here are six key takeaways from my perspective as the moderator.
- Hospital emergency rooms and primary care provider offices are the MBH safety nets for their communities—and the safety net is wearing down. Provider burnout and lack of adequate training are serious challenges.
- Despite being burnt out, providers’ reluctance to change is still hampering efforts to implement new care models or digital tools to support MBH care delivery. The panelists suggested that simply listening to providers is often the best first step to understanding their concerns, identifying underlying issues, and defining a desired end state.
- The introduction of so many MBH care delivery “solutions” is creating decision paralysis. But there’s no point waiting for a one-size-fits-all solution—the reality is that multiple in-person and digital solutions working in tandem will be required to mitigate the MBH crisis. Organizations need to focus on creating the right equation for the individual patients in their community.
- With very few evidence-based practice models in existence for MBH, the Collaborative Care Model is continuing to garner attention as an effective way to focus on early identification and management of MBH needs in the primary care setting.
- The patient perspective must be at the core of any behavioral health delivery model. Treating the “whole person” must start with understanding the myriad barriers that prevent equitable access to care.
- Behavioral healthcare servicesmust begin during childhood. It’s imperative for organizations to understand younger patients’ MBH needs, adopt models to address them, and increase access to care.
At the end of the session, the panelists each left the audience with a call to action, which I would summarize as follows: True reform of the behavioral healthcare delivery system will require each of us to put on our “healthcare optimist” hats (shout-out to Chris Hemphill for etching this phrase into my brain). The work ahead of us is hard and the path is still largely uncharted, but committing to and prioritizing the behavioral health of our families, our friends, our communities, and ourselves is the only logical next step.
Edited by: Matt Maslin
Published April 25, 2023