Patients diagnosed with both opioid use disorder (OUD) and a psychiatric condition can experience decades-long delays before receiving treatment and significant barriers to care.
A new partnership between OUD treatment provider Ophelia and hybrid mental health provider Thriveworks is seeking to provide an accessible pipeline to care for patients with co-occurring OUD and psychiatric disorders.
Through the partnership, Thriveworks clinicians can now refer patients that they determine require specialized treatment to Ophelia for care. In turn, Ophelia patients needing more mental health support beyond OUD treatment can receive therapy and psychiatry from Thriveworks.
“We’re a specialty care provider,” Zack Gray, founder and CEO of Ophelia, told Addiction Treatment Business. “We try to treat them for other conditions, but we’re limited in what we can do. … We look to partners to make that happen and Thriveworks is one of the best out there. When we think of the value-add to Ophelia, it’s obviously add-on psychiatric services for our patients, but also for our patients’ families.”
Gray said that approximately two-thirds of Ophelia’s patients have co-occurring psychiatric conditions.
New York-based Ophelia, known for its edgy marketing campaigns, offers medication-assisted treatment (MAT) for people with opioid use disorder (OUD) through a team-based clinical model and software platform. The provider is licensed to provide digital treatment in 49 states and D.C. and contracts with Medicaid, Medicare and commercial insurers.
Improving access to all types of behavioral health care is one of Thriveworks’ core missions, Dr. Daniel Frogel, CEO of Thriveworks, told ATB.
“We also know where we fall short, especially when it comes to some of the more unique and complex specialties that exist across the mental health care continuum,” Frogel said. “Substance use disorders are certainly issues that we identify within the midst of our patients. We’re trying to set up networks of like-minded organizations and clinicians that really have the same focus on clinical quality, care and access that we do. Certainly, Ophelia checks all those boxes and then some.”
Lynchburg, Virginia-based Thriveworks operates 340 offices and has a staff of more than 2,200 clinicians in 49 states and D.C. Founded in 2008, Thriveworks provides online and in-person mental health care to adults, teens and children.
Patients identified as needing specialty services are escalated to a customer success team, which creates a referral pathway and hands patients off to the other providers’ scheduling partners.
Thriveworks overhauled some of its processes in preparation for the partnership with Ophelia. The provider implemented additional training for its clinicians and optimized its electronic medical record (EMR) to help identify patients needing OUD treatment.
Partnerships that allow providers to offer services outside their usual offerings are becoming more common in the behavioral health industry.
In June, digital substance use disorder (SUD) provider Pelago partnered with several brick-and-mortar-based SUD providers to improve access to inpatient services for higher-acuity patients.
In February, Spring Health partnered with 2Morrow Health to make smoking cessation tools available to Spring patients.
The same month, virtual mental health provider Talkspace made a deal with digital SUD treatment provider Bicycle Health to offer both companies’ patients access to both therapy and OUD treatment.
Partnerships like this allow providers to specialize in their area of expertise while promoting a full continuum of care, Gray and Frogel agreed.
“I don’t think anyone’s going to crack the code on delivering the entire continuum of mental health services under one single roof,” Frogel said. “I think it’s important that as more specialty organizations are emerging, there [be] better collaboration.”