Behavioral health service provider Amae Health and Boston-based legacy teaching hospital Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) have partnered to form the Amae Institute — a professional education hub for care providers focusing on a new approach to serious mental illness (SMI) care.

A clinical educator team with experts from MGH will work with Amae Health providers to develop a standardized curriculum, incorporating the hospital’s decades of research and clinical expertise in behavioral health to tailor the educational program to upskill Amae’s clinicians. The program will prioritize training clinicians to care for high-acuity patients and developing data-driven, precise care approaches for patients with SMI. 

The educational collaboration aims to combine MGH’s expertise and apply it to outpatient care to better equip Amae’s professionals with more comprehensive methods for treating patients experiencing SMIs beyond their interactions inside the four walls of a hospital.

“One of the pain points that we set out to solve is, what do you do after a suicide attempt? Where do you go after a psychotic break? Where do you go after a manic episode that oftentimes lands you in the hospital or some other setting?” Stas Sokolin, CEO and co-founder of Amae Health, told Behavioral Health Business. “That has not really been the focus of a lot of institutions because that’s not what they’re set up to do. Places like Mass General have so much knowledge and research, but the care they provide is very much inside the walls of the hospital. What we do is provide care for somebody thereafter. We are very excited about being able to take their learnings, their decades of research and providing care, and create something that is much more attributable outside the four walls.”

The newly formed Amae Institute will focus on whole-person care and promote integrated care for patients who experience SMIs by involving psychiatrists, primary care providers, therapists, dietitians, health coaches and peer support specialists into a singular care team that will collaborate to address psychiatric needs, but also social support, individual goals, nutrition and physical health.

A focus on standardizing care

Standardizing psychiatric care while also reconfiguring its delivery to focus on a value-based approach beyond the four walls of traditional behavioral health treatment is the “North Star” of the Amae Institute, Sokolin said.

Reimbursement models and payer negotiations around the type of whole-person care the institute hopes to standardize will ultimately prioritize patient outcomes over financial metrics. Clinicians within the Amae Institute will be trained to do what’s best for the patient beyond traditional billing codes.

“We very often do things that are not reimbursable because it’s the right thing for patients. We will go and meet patients at their home, and we will go with them to job interviews. Work with them to ride the subway. We’ll go to job interviews with our patients. We’ll help them enroll in school. We’ll go to the [social security]office to help them enroll in disability benefits,” Sokolin said. “There are no billing codes. That’s just because the right thing to do for our patients, and it will deliver better outcomes. Our belief is that in the long term, those better outcomes will be seen by payers, by health systems, but more importantly, felt by our patients.”

Some potential metrics for payer negotiations that the collaboration will track will be lowering readmission rates, patient engagement, cost reduction and medication adherence. Long term, the partnership intends to develop predictive metrics for treatment and to showcase improved patient outcomes. Standardizing the curriculum to train Amae clinicians, whether they are working at a clinic in Los Angeles or one in New York, will also create standardized data that can inform payer negotiations, he said.

As the institute becomes more established, it may, in time, publish usable insights and best practices for clinicians to utilize outside of Amae and MGH.

While the partnership between the two is only an educational one for now, there are conversations behind the scenes on how to possibly expand beyond curriculum and training as well, Sokolin said.

The Amae Institute’s clinical educator team will be led by Corinne Cather and Kim Mueser, who are both currently employed by MGH. 

“Through this effort, we are helping to create an educational foundation that empowers clinicians to deliver transformative, integrated care for those living with severe mental illness,” Dr. Maurizio Fava, chair of the Mass General Brigham Academic Medical Center’s Psychiatry Department, said in a news release.

Upskilling Amae’s clinicians through this structured, data-driven, scalable curriculum via the co-developed courses with MGH experts will, according to Sokolin, “get all of our providers to be great providers.”

Additional courses for the Amae Institute will likely be developed through the partnership over time, he said.