GREENFIELD — With a new state grant in hand, Baystate Franklin Medical Center launched a new program Friday morning that hospital leaders hope will reduce the number of patients who visit the emergency room repeatedly over a short time period.
The $1.8 million grant from the Massachusetts Health Policy Commission will support the hospital as it implements the state’s Community Hospital Acceleration, Revitalization and Transformation Investment program, or CHART.
The program will help the hospital identify repeat patients, figure out what’s at the root of those frequent visits and connect them with the community organizations or resources who can help them address their medical needs or concerns in other ways.
Many of those visits, noted Baystate Franklin interim president Dr. Thomas Higgins, are due to behavioral, socioeconomic and complex medical issues. Commonly, the patients experience substance abuse issues, barriers to obtaining transportation to traditional medical services, chronic diseases or lack of knowledge about nutrition and health care.
To that end, the hospital is collaborating with local organizations like Clinical and Support Options and Franklin County Home Care, now known as Lifepath Inc.
David Seltz, the commission’s executive director, noted that Massachusetts has a higher rate of readmission and emergency room use than many other states, much of which can attributed to behavioral health issues. He noted that the state has seen a 25 percent increase in emergency room visits related to behavioral health between 2010 and 2014.
“That’s a striking number, and you all have seen these people coming through your doors, needing help, needing to connect to care they weren’t being able to connect to,” Seltz said, addressing the room of hospital staff, administrators and local social service providers. “What CHART is doing, and what you’re doing here, is creating that care team, creating that place where you can connect those people to what they need and get them stabilized and healthy.”
That, he said, would avoid ER visits that don’t need to happen, reducing the cost burden on the health care system, insurance companies and other patients.
Andrea Nathanson, the hospital’s finance director, said the program will target patients who have been discharged from the hospital more than four times in the last 12 months or patients who have had five or more behavioral health visits to the ER within the same time frame.
Currently, about 200 of the hospital’s patients qualify for the program, and 60 have been enrolled. Once a patient has been identified, a team of nurses, behavioral health specialists, mental health counselors and social workers will intervene to help find out what the patient’s needs are.
It will also expand the Screening, Brief Intervention and Referral to Treatment, or SBIRT, program for patients with substance abuse issues.
“Our aim is to reduce 30-day ED visits by 25 percent and reduce 30-day readmissions by 25 percent within the two-year grant period,” she said.
The Health Policy Commission was established three years ago to focus on containing health care costs and making it more affordable and effective for state residents. Seltz said that even though the program requires an investment to implement, he expects it will save money in the long run.
“For an agency that’s primarily focused on containing health care costs, it’s a little bit strange for us to be spending money, but that’s because we believe that these investments will pay off,” said Seltz. “We know there are tremendous patient needs that are going un-addressed, and when those needs are un-addressed, they show up in the emergency room, come back to the hospital, and their care needs are not met in a way that could avoid all of that high cost, unnecessary utilization.”
Dr. Mark Keroack, the president of the Baystate Health System, said the CHART program is another piece of the hospital’s effort to increase care for its patients through a regional approach.