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New Collaboration with Regions Hospital

July 15, 2020

One of the goals at People Incorporated is to find the gaps in mental health care and fill them. Last winter (prior to the outbreak of COVID-19 in the U.S.), People Incorporated’s leadership met with staff at Regions Hospital in St. Paul to discuss ways we could provide more integrated care for mental health patients leaving the hospital.
 
“Collaboration is a critical part of providing seamless services. We work in a complicated system that can be difficult to navigate. Our partnerships make the system less complicated,” says Katie O’Brien, Vice President of Operations at People Incorporated.
 
This month, People Incorporated launched a new collaboration with Regions Hospital to provide support for individuals transitioning out of hospital care.
 
“It’s important that people see a doctor 30 days after their discharge to check that their medications are working well, but finding a provider with openings within 30 days can be extremely difficult,” says O’Brien. “Our goal is to fill that gap with providers at our mental health clinics, and then utilize this time to connect them to other valuable services that may support their long-term recovery, such as therapy, case management, and other supports.”

This new collaboration launched despite the challenges presented by COVID-19 and social distancing.

“In these challenging and constantly changing times, we continue to innovate services. We are identifying new gaps and responding. Out initial questions to the Regions Hospital team was, “How can we collaborate to provide better service?” and “How do we integrate inpatient and outpatient systems to provide better client care?,” O’Brien said.”During this process, we listened to feedback from hospital social workers and staff on ways to improve their ability to refer individuals to our programs, then worked internally to create a better referral pipeline.”

“Integrated care is what we’re all moving towards. It means that we’re no longer working with just a snapshot of information while a client is with us, and instead are working with the whole of what that clients journey represents,” said O’Brien. “With more collaboration and integration between our programs, we’re going to get better outcomes for our clients.”