Supporting Mental and Behavioral Health

Last week we announced our new contract with the Delaware Department of Health and Social Services, Division of Substance Abuse and Mental Health (DSAMH) to help state residents find the substance use disorder and mental health services they need. This week, we’re focusing on our deep experience in partnering with organizations nationwide to support mental and behavioral health.

According to the National Alliance for Mental Illness (NAMI), 22.8% or 1 in 5 U.S. adults experienced mental illness in 2021, and 33.5% of these adults also experienced a substance use disorder. Mental and behavioral health challenges often go hand-in-hand with, or cause, additional social needs.

For example, NAMI’s research shows that the rate of unemployment is higher among U.S. adults who have mental illness (7.4%) compared to those who do not (4.6%), 21.1% of people experiencing homelessness in the U.S. have a serious mental health condition, and high school students with depression are more than twice as likely to drop out of school compared to their peers.

Helping Vulnerable Populations and People in Crisis

At Findhelp, we have a history of partnering with our customers across industries to address the social needs of substance users and support mental and behavioral health.

Our platform includes situational filters to help users narrow their search to programs that specialize in addressing substance use and mental or behavioral health challenges.

Read on to learn more about how we’re collaborating with some incredible customers to address the mental and behavioral health challenges faced by the populations they serve – patients, staff, and the general public.

Tailoring the Findhelp Platform to Better Serve Your Population

Our platform is designed to allow customer organizations to tailor their displayed navigation categories (food, housing, health, etc.) to fit the needs of the populations they serve. The following customers used this functionality to show groups of programs relevant for folks experiencing mental and/or behavioral health challenges.

Our customer Behavioral Health Partners of MetroWest is an innovative partnership that brings together the strengths and capabilities of leading social services and behavioral health agencies serving the Greater MetroWest region of Massachusetts.

These partner organizations – Advocates, South Middlesex Opportunity Council (SMOC), Spectrum Health Systems, and Wayside Youth & Family Support Network – encompass expertise in mental health, substance use and addiction, housing, and social support for people of all ages.

MetroWest partnered with us to configure their patient site, MetroWest Care Connection (powered by Findhelpv) to focus navigation categories on mental health, addiction & recovery, emergency services, and more, guiding their patients to the most relevant resources.

To Write Love on Her Arms (TWLOHA) is a nonprofit movement dedicated to presenting hope and finding help for people struggling with depression, addiction, self-injury, and suicide. TWLOHA exists to encourage, inform, inspire, and invest directly in treatment and recovery.

They launched their Findhelp platform in 2018 with tailored navigation categories to focus on programs that offer counseling, crisis services, peer support, and more, and they feature specific community programs that they endorse or work with directly.

Partnering to Expand Care Networks

At Findhelp, we’ve built the nation’s largest social care referral network. The following customers chose to partner with us as an efficient and easy way to expand their existing internal and local networks of social support resources to better address substance use and mental or behavioral health challenges.

Based in Georgia, Highland Rivers Behavioral Health is a behavioral healthcare agency offering services for adults, youth, and families with mental health and addictive disease challenges as well as adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

As a public safety net provider, they serve individuals who have little to no financial resources, as well as veterans and persons with State and Federal benefits such as Medicaid and Medicare. Highland Rivers launched their branded Findhelp platform in 2022 to bolster their current behavioral health service offering to include a diverse array of important social care resources.

Hope For The Day empowers the conversation on proactive suicide prevention and mental health education. They focus on proactive prevention, creating an environment that doesn’t wait for someone to reach a point of crisis to address their mental health.

They launched Resource Compass (powered by Findhelp) in 2022 as a place for people in need to find important information and resources to proactively support their mental health.

Optum is breaking new ground in behavioral health by driving better overall health outcomes while bringing down the total cost of care through both services and tools.

Formerly known as Optum Behavioral Health, they launched the Optum Community Connector (powered by Findhelp) in January 2019 to connect people with community social services while also bringing them into Optum’s internal network of behavioral health providers and resources.

Analyzing Community Trends

All Findhelp customers have access to our native suite of data and analytics dashboards. Many data-driven organizations purchase access to their platforms’ raw data via a SQL connection to build custom reports, understand community needs, and evaluate outcomes.

The following is just one example of how our customers take advantage of this offering to combine datasets from multiple sources and connect Findhelp data with clinical data to better understand the health outcomes of addressing SDoH.

The Minnesota Association of Community Mental Health Programs works with Findhelp through Convergence Integrated Care (CIC), a network of 21 independent nonprofit community and behavioral health agencies throughout the state of Minnesota.

In partnership with CIC, these organizations are not only providing a network of standardized care but also sharing innovations and increasing access to crucial behavioral health services. They launched their CIC Resources platform (powered by Findhelp) in May 2023 for their member organizations to complete social needs assessments, share resources, and follow up on patients’ SDoH needs.

CIC uses Findhelp’s data warehouse through a SQL connection to marry social need data and outcomes in Findhelp to the greater population health data of member organizations, and they also collaborate with the State of Minnesota to improve statewide health outcomes.