WellStone Part of Growing Trend of Behavioral Health Providers Moving Toward Value-Based Care

As health care continues to move more in the direction of value-based care, there is seemingly increased recognition among providers that either they get on board with the transition to measurement-based outcomes for patients or get left behind.

Scourges like the pandemic and the substance use disorder epidemic have resulted in a surge in demand for behavioral health services. As a result, it has arguably never been more important for behavioral health providers to demonstrate effective treatment outcomes in order to better negotiate with payors.

One such provider working toward those ends is Huntsville, Alabama-based WellStone, which treats over 13,000 patients annually across 12 behavioral health facilities in northern Alabama.

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WellStone CEO Jeremy Blair is among those in behavioral health who have been reading the tea leaves on value-based care and been working to get the provider up to speed as it looks to enter such reimbursement arrangements.

“I started off as a clinician a long time ago, and one of the challenges was, ‘How do you know your clients are getting better?’” Blair told Behavioral Health Business. “That’s always been a frustrating piece for therapists.”

Blair said it is critical that patient progress be demonstrated quantitatively not just to providers, but to patients themselves who may struggle to understand where they are on their care journey.

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“Sometimes when we get into the weeds of therapy, we lose that perspective of, ‘Hey, things are getting better, and let me show you this graph of where your depression was when you first came in, and now look at the reduction in those symptoms over the last month,’” he said.

When it comes to getting behavioral health providers on board with the move toward value-based care, Owl also knows the challenge quite well. Since 2013, the Portland, Oregon-based platform has partnered with a number of providers to offer evidence-based solutions for improving behavioral health care delivery and outcomes.

Those partnerships include a number of health care systems, addiction treatment provider Recovery Centers of America – which last year struck a deal to use Owl’s platform at 10 of its inpatient facilities – as well as most recently with WellStone.

Owl, which was formerly Owl Insights before undergoing a rebrand last year, has raised $16.4 million according to Crunchbase.

Owl’s platform helps providers track care delivery through a library of over 250 measures that take into account a variety of behavioral health conditions and social determinants of health. The platform is also designed to capture patient information that can help providers identify acute behavioral risks such as suicidal ideation, as well as helping payors and managed care organizations lower care costs through data transparency.

“I think the commitment to value-based care aligns very well with our vision of where we see behavioral health headed,” Owl President and CEO Eric Meier told BHB.

Patient engagement is a high priority for Blair at WellStone, which he notes is an area that behavioral health providers nationwide struggle with and which he is hopeful the Owl platform can help streamline for the provider. According to Blair, WellStone is likely to share a summary of the data generated from the platform with payors and contractors.

“The client retention rate is definitely a piece that we’ve said from the get go that we wanted to target,” he said. “I don’t think we’ve [quantified], ‘Hey, we want a 25% increase there.’ But we do track that as a part of our overall [Promoting Interoperability] measures, and so we will be able to at least see that in our data set.”

Owl touts that its measurement-based platform has resulted in a 30% reduction of care costs, which is in stark contrast to an estimated 52% rise in overall mental health care spending since 2009. Owl – which additionally provides services to community mental health organizations – also claims that its platform allows providers to achieve a patient engagement rate of 80%, which is double that of the industry standard.

Of the 250-plus evidence-based measurements in Owl’s library, Meier said that providers do not gravitate towards only a handful for assessing care outcomes. Rather, by his estimates, providers will usually select anywhere between 50 to 90 of the measurements.

“We want to make sure we’ve got a broad enough content library that allows our customers to deliver best of care,” Meier stated. “There may be nuances based upon the type of patients being seen, whether it’s age, whether it’s the type of services being provided … everything from substance use to general anxiety.”

Meier, for his part, believes that Owl can help WellStone be an industrywide example of effective value-based care.

“If we can give the information to [WellStone] consistently with what we’ve done for other customers – [such as] identifying those folks that are ready to be stepped down or discharged from treatment – and do this on an ongoing basis, that will allow WellStone to be able to treat more folks,” Meier said. “We’ve seen this consistently across our customer base, and I believe this sets their organization up well for value-based care.”

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