Intermountain Health and NeuroFlow have teamed up to bring behavioral health screening and analytics to primary care patients in Colorado.
The health system will leverage the behavioral health tech company’s integrated care offering to help providers better understand their patients. While the partnership will initially focus on screenings in the primary care setting, Intermountain hopes to expand offerings with time.
NeuroFlow will integrate behavioral health analytics into care workflows and engage patients with relevant digital resources and interventions. It will also provide suicide prevention services to patients and offer outreach from trained crisis professionals.
The partnership supports Intermountain’s goals to improve outcomes by proactively identifying health needs, which can be difficult at scale. As Intermountain has expanded, it has begun looking to tech solutions to further enable the work of providers without burdening them.
“This is an important challenge across the country,” Tammer Attallah, LCSW, executive director of Intermountain’s behavioral health clinical program, told Fierce Healthcare. “We’re excited to do this work, to be really proactive about the work we’re doing without putting it on the shoulders of our patients and providers who deliver the care.”
In his role, Attallah is focused on investing in evidence-based practices to improve clinical outcomes. Among those strategies are getting the right diagnosis, directing patients to the right care pathway and importantly, measuring if they are improving.
“Everybody talks about how we really need to improve access to care—that presumes that that care is effective,” Attallah said. Even among people who have access to behavioral health, only a third get better, he noted.
Timely connections to the right care increases the likelihood of a patient engaging with that treatment. But understanding their needs well enough to make those connections can be a challenge. Though Intermountain has been screening patients, those solutions haven’t quite hit the mark, per Attallah.
“We are first and foremost a healthcare system; we are not a technology company,” he said.
The benefit of a vendor like NeuroFlow is the flexibility to customize solutions and integrate it with the EHR to offer a seamless experience, Attallah added. In the coming months, Intermountain will work with NeuroFlow to co-design the workflow for its implementation in the primary care setting.
“We don’t believe in creating a workflow from the top down,” Attallah explained. “It’s actually designed from the lens of the providers doing the work day in and day out, as opposed to just imposing a workflow that oftentimes just doesn’t work.”
NeuroFlow executives argue its technology can surface often hidden behavioral risks and help address them early.
“Capturing accurate behavioral health data at scale can be incredibly challenging, particularly when organizations rely on in-person screenings alone,” Jeremy Kreyling, SVP of Healthcare Informatics at NeuroFlow, said in a press release. NeuroFlow works to engage patients throughout many digital touchpoints and uses AI to understand their acuity in real time, he added. “Having actionable population insights unlocks new opportunities for organizations like Intermountain to increase enrollment and engagement in integrated care programs, with an added layer of outreach for patients experiencing suicide ideation.”
The established cadence of behavioral health screens for Intermountain’s primary care patients will be at least annually, per Attallah, but will likely vary depending on the specific needs of different patient groups.