Intermountain Health announced Thursday that it is partnering with NeuroFlow, a Philadelphia-based behavioral health analytics and technology company, to better integrate behavioral health into primary care.
Details of the partnership became clearer in an interview with Tammer Attallah, the executive director of Intermountain Health’s Behavioral Health Clinical Program, who explained that the multi-phase partnership will begin with a pilot that will bring NeuroFlow’s capabilities to five primary care locations in Colorado.
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“We want to recognize that identifying as early as possible the needs for behavioral health are incredibly critical for our health system. In order to do that, we’ve been on this journey for decades now. And one of the biggest challenges that we have is really a standardized approach at identifying not just the need for behavioral health, but also understanding the acuity and the complexity without adding the burden to both the patient or the prospective patient and the provider is very, very important as we move forward, particularly in primary care,” Attallah explained.
The goal is to get away from burdensome paper forms and surveys that providers make patients fill out to gauge their mental status and more seamlessly integrate behavioral health with primary care.
“We think about all the surveys that we take across many domains, not just in healthcare, and how much fatigue we have in that space. And so is there a way for us to do that in the most seamless way possible?” Attallah said in a Zoom interview before the announcement.
That question led them to NeuroFlow. For a fee — Attalah declined to say how much — Intermountain Health will get access to NeuroFlow’s population-wide behavioral health identification and support, as well as suicide prevention services. Trained crisis professionals will also provide outreach to Intermountain patients. Patients will be able to access appropriate content through patient portals and apps, and depending on their responses, NeuroFlow will provide content and active outreach.
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Attallah acknowledged that there are a plethora of behavioral health tech vendors but declined to identify any Intermountain evaluated before choosing NeuroFlow’s solution. He did say however that the partnership did not come about overnight.
“Intermountain Health is an integrated health system, really thinking about proactive care, value-based care, that sort of work, the work that really thinks about providing care as upstream as possible and so [Neurolfow’s] partnerships, for example, with organizations like the VA is incredibly appealing to us,” Attallah explained. “They’ve done work in that space and they’ve demonstrated a track record of actually how they interact with health systems.”
One attraction to a technology like NeuroFlow is that potential to simplify the experience for patients without adding to clinician burnout.
“There’s the support through NeuroFlow to do active outreach, to engage with the patient, to connect them into care. In today’s environment, we need a mechanism to do that … that doesn’t add unnecessary burden,” Attallah said.
Integrating behavioral care without putting additional administrative burden on primary care clinicians is probably one reason that NeuroFlow has found takers of its technology in several health systems, including Atlantic Health system, Magellan Health, Emory Healthcare, Jefferson Health and Ascension.
But the Salt Lake City, Utah health system’s intent is not simply to plug a technology into a primary care environment and test how it works. Rather it’s about marrying its experience from collecting behavioral health information through screening tools over the last 20 years and trying to integrate with their primary care with NeuroFlow’s tech-enabled platform and infrastructure.
“Our hope is that we use both of those, both of that knowledge to further develop what they have, which is an incredible product,” Attallah declared. “But for the time being, right now we want to first implement and embed their infrastructure into our electronic health record within Epic in an effort to first get that piece in place,” he said.
One of the challenges in adopting any new technology is to know how to measure efficacy and Attallah’s hope is to be able to engage in measurement-based care, something that has historically been lacking in behavioral health overall and it might be argued for healthcare in general. This is how Attallah described it:
“Right now, if we look at care across the country, because there’s no infrastructure to measure the outcomes of care in a regular, standardized, meaningful, consumer-centric, and provider-centric way. The likelihood of a patient improving — this is across the country, this isn’t Intermountain but across the country — on average is about a third of the time someone’s going to get better when they land somewhere,” he pointed out. “What we know by randomized control trials, when they actually measure the outcomes and they match the right services to the right provider, the efficacy is oftentimes as great as salicylates, aka aspirin, is to a headache.”
And that is what Intermountain is hoping NeuroFlow is to behavioral health conditions for its patient population.
Photo: Gerasimov174, Getty Images