OneFifteen is moving from a management service organization to a full substance use disorder (SUD) provider, parting ways with its former operating partner, Samaritan Behavioral Health.
The decision marks a new chapter for one of the more interesting companies in the SUD space.
“We set up OneFifteen as a management services organization and partnered with other direct providers,” Marti Taylor, president and CEO of OneFifteen, told Behavioral Health Business. “That was a really quick way for us to get into the market, but also for us to think about how we add something unique and differentiated in this space.”
The nonprofit organization was formed by Alphabet’s (Nasdaq: GOOGL) life science subsidiary, Verily, and health care partners Kettering Health Network and Premier Health. It uses analytics and wrap-around services to help drive SUD care.
After starting four years ago, OneFifteen has served 7,000 patients. It has a 4.5-acre campus in Dayton, Ohio, with roughly 100 beds.
“We’re at a point where with the learnings that we have and the partnerships we’ve built, we feel like we’re ready to transition to OneFifteen being the direct care provider,” Taylor said. “It was a mutually accepted conversion with our operating partner, Samaritan Behavioral Health.”
The former will continue to stay in the community, but OneFifteen will take over as the care provider of services on their campus.
A focus on wrap-around services
The continuity of services will remain in place during this transition, and OneFifteen is analyzing the community’s needs, Taylor noted.
“That continuum of care where patients can transverse from different levels of care as needed is really important to have,” Taylor said. “So we will commit to that and [operate] outpatient services, crisis services, inpatient residential services, both high- and low-intensity services.”
The provider is looking at addressing social determinants of health (SDoH) that can impact a patient’s overall well-being. As part of that, OneFifteen is building houses in the neighborhoods that it serves.
Another crucial part of OneFifteen’s approach to addressing SDoH is providing its patients with care advocates. These staff members are not clinicians but can help evaluate a patient’s SDoH, including if a patient has a job, stable housing, access to food, and if they need support with other social service agencies in the community.
“When our patients enter our ecosystem, they get assigned a care advocate,” Taylor said. “We don’t want to wait until discharge. We really want to start that on admission so that we’re thinking about all of those social determinants of health that folks need help with.”
The Verily connection
One thing that will stay the same as OneFifteen moves into the provider role is its focus on using technology in care.
Its high-tech connection to Google’s sister company, Verily, allows it to use analytics to drive measurement-based care.
“Measurement-informed care is really [core to] our strategy to systematically collect data that are important to patients at the right time,” Elisabeth Okrant, evidence generation and quality improvement lead at Verily, told BHB. “So that we can provide the treatment and services that patients need not necessarily at the point of treatment, … but that a provider can react in real-time to their needs.”
Okrant is also chair of OneFifteen Health’s board of directors.
OneFifteen collects data focused on recovery from a patient’s point of view. This includes gathering information about a patient’s social drivers of health, their family and friend relationships, as well as their therapeutic relationships.
The metrics will also include information about a patient’s overall quality of life and screens for co-occurring behavioral health conditions.
“We know they’re great indicators of retention and longer-term recovery,” Okrant said.
Figuring out the future
While OneFifteen started in the fee-for-service model, wrap-around services and measurement-based care are often the foundations of a value-based care arrangement.
And this could be the case for OneFifteen moving forward. The Ohio organization has long prioritized such partnerships from the early days and has already had payers at the table, Taylor said.
“Having the payers with us early on was important [for] helping them to understand what we were building out and having them help guide us as to what was needed in the communities,” Taylor said. “We will be moving more towards value-based contracts. Like many, we started with the fee-for-service model and then moved towards value-based, but we are very committed to better outcomes and lower costs. That’s also been one of our guiding principles all the way through this.”
By 2024-2025, OneFifteen plans to move into value-based contracts with several payers, Taylor said.
But first, the organization will focus on the growing pains of any new provider – the staffing and the licensure process.
“Going from being a management services organization and shifting to being the direct provider, that, in and of itself [is demanding], and just the work that we need to do for the certifications and regulatory and hiring staff at a time when there’s just more demand than there are providers in this space,” Taylor said. “So, we’ll be focusing there. Our absolute No. 1 priority through this transition with Samaritan Behavioral Health is to ensure that we care for those patients in the community during this transition time.”
The organization is also looking to evolve its model in the future. Specifically, it will continue to invest in the brick-and-mortar campus and open up access to treatment with a hybrid care model. But the provider plans to take it slow.
“One of the things that we have also said early on is we want to make sure we’re not scaling too quickly,” Taylor said. “We want to make sure we have the learnings and we’re taking those learnings and feeding those back in and saying here’s what we saw the first couple of years. Here’s what we’re seeing now. And continue to drive improvements and evolve.”
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