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Harris County Hospital District Wins Statewide Community Service Award AUSTIN (Feb. 16, 2010) – The Harris County Hospital District will receive the Texas Hospital Association’s 2009 Excellence in Community Service Award for its innovative Community Behavioral Health Program. The award will be presented on Feb. 18 at THA’s Leadership Conference in Austin. Through the CBHP, the hospital district has been able to provide behavioral health services to more patients, while dramatically shortening wait times for appointments and reducing the number of admissions to the district’s inpatient psychiatric unit. “With Houston having one of the highest rates of uninsured residents in the state, programs such as this provide a lifeline to those dealing with mental illness,” said Dan Stultz, M.D., FACP, FACHE, president/chief executive officer of THA. In Harris County alone, an estimated 500,000 adults are mentally ill, and about 147,000 of those have a serious form of mental illness. Of those 147,000, approximately 92,000 are uninsured. Until 2004, when the Community Behavioral Health Program was founded, all HCHD behavioral health services were provided at one hospital-based psychiatric outpatient clinic that had an average waiting period of six to eight months for new appointments. In 2004, HCHD case managers, psychiatry faculty from the Menninger Department of Psychiatry at Baylor College of Medicine, primary care faculty from Baylor College of Medicine and The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, and representatives from the Houston Council on Alcohol and Drugs met to discuss strategies for increasing access to services and reducing the number of inappropriate visits for mental health issues to HCHD’s already overcrowded emergency centers. They agreed that behavioral health services should be expanded to include the 13 community health centers as well as to some of the eight school-based centers located within HCHD’s Ambulatory Care Services. With a commitment from the two medical schools, HCHD launched a pilot to integrate behavioral health services into three community health centers. The plan was to place psychiatrists into the centers, where they would evaluate and treat patients and provide consultation to the primary care physicians. In doing so, they hoped to increase the comfort level of primary care physicians in providing primary care psychiatric interventions. Once the pilot proved overwhelmingly successful, the program received a one-year start-up grant from the Hogg Foundation for Mental Illness as well as a donation from Abbott Laboratories to create training DVDs and audiotapes for primary care physicians. Following the completion of the first full year in July 2006, HCHD agreed to fund the entire program due to its success and satisfaction rates. The program is guided by a steering committee composed of psychiatrists, substance abuse counselors, nurses, social workers, primary care physicians and administrative community center directors. CBHP’s services include evaluation and treatment of scheduled patients, walk-in services for patients in crisis, and “curbside consultations,” in which a primary care physician discusses a patient’s condition with a psychiatrist without obtaining a formal consultation, in order to support behavioral health interventions implemented by the physicians themselves. Psychotherapy sessions are provided to individuals, couples and families. Patients with substance abuse problems are referred to specialists within HCHD’s substance abuse InSight Project. CBHP provides behavioral health services to approximately 11,000 people each year. Even more important, waiting periods for new behavioral health appointments have been reduced from the previous six-eight months to four-six weeks within CBHP at the community health centers and two to three weeks at HCHD’s only outpatient psychiatric clinic located at Ben Taub. Patients with more urgent needs can be seen on the same day or within the same week. In addition, admissions to the hospital-based psychiatric emergency center have declined by 18-25 percent. “The program has brought enormous happiness and enormous satisfaction,” said Britta Ostermeyer, M.D, director of CBHP and chief of psychiatry at Ben Taub General Hospital and HCHD. “Our motto is ‘Building a Healthier Community,’ and we believe we have done that.” The Harris County Hospital District is the public healthcare system for the nation’s third most-populous county. It provides more than 1.4 million healthcare visits each year to residents of Harris County. The hospital district operates Ben Taub General Hospital, Lyndon B. Johnson General Hospital, Quentin Mease Community Hospital, 13 community health centers, a dialysis center, a dental center, eight school-based clinics, 13 homeless shelter clinics and five mobile health units.
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