Alternative Headline: Outreach Boosts SUD Care
[MM Curator Summary]: A new outreach model successfully connects Medicaid SUD patients to care, reducing facility visits and improving outcomes.
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A new outreach model designed to engage Medicaid recipients with substance use disorders (SUDs) has yielded a 65% success rate in linking them to care. The program, led by Wayspring in partnership with Highmark Health Options, is engaging Delaware patients in a new “boots-on-the-ground” fashion and has reduced hospital and facility visits by as much as 30%.
Treatment initiation and adherence are notoriously low for patients with SUDs – even more so among Medicaid recipients who, on average, are diagnosed with SUDs at a higher rate. These factors compelled Nashville, Tennessee-based Wayspring, an addiction care provider that partners with health plans, to team up with Highmark Health Options, a prominent Medicaid managed care organization throughout Delaware.
Rather than expecting appointment reminders and phone calls to engage or re-engage an SUD patient in care, Wayspring outreach specialists met with individuals who were identified as having “the steepest barriers to care” at shelters and in neighborhoods. Amid these outreach efforts, the team identified 150 patients with 300 unique needs around clothing, housing and transportation access and helped meet those needs with wraparound services.
After these efforts, 200 Wayspring clinic appointments in the Delaware region were made and completed.
Although the current model is specific to Delaware, Wayspring has extended similar outreach services across its operations in Kentucky and Tennessee as well.
“Wayspring is evaluating how to do this in each one of our geographical footprints in our current states,” Ashley Potts, Wayspring’s vice president of operations in Delaware, told Behavioral Health Business. “Delaware was first, and then we quickly pivoted to be able to do this in our other states. ”
This type of “street medicine” model, as Potts calls it, differentiates itself from others because of the level of detail Wayspring outreach specialists get into within these communities. Their research extends beyond the neighborhoods and areas where they could have the most impact and takes into account the vehicles they drive into these communities, what they wear, the dialect they use and more.
“We don’t want to wear colors that mirror first responders, for example,” Potts said. “We want to remove any barrier that we can foresee and just try to be known to them as ‘Ashley from Wayspring is coming to help me.’ We really tried to look at it from every angle.”
Removing barriers down to a granular level like this removes resistance in these conversations, she explained.
To measure long-term success, Wayspring plans to continuously track how long a patient stays engaged after this outreach, if they are attending treatment, abstaining from use of substances and if emergency department visits for a specific patient go down from 20 visits one year to even 18 the next. These metrics may vary from patient to patient, she explained.
Even though this model focuses on engaging the Medicaid population and street medicine outreach, Potts said this type of work could and should be extended beyond these parameters.
“I think sometimes the historical way has been, if you’re using substances, you need to go to inpatient treatment, and that there is this exact linear progression that you’re supposed to follow,” she said. “But addiction is so complex… There’s just so much more to it than just ‘stop using drugs.’ If we could actually create a model that just reaches the whole person, wherever they may be, I think individuals would have a much greater chance of success.”
Companies featured in this article:
Highmark Health Options, Wayspring
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