Hi, everyone. This is Erica Spicer Mason with
the Becker's Healthcare Podcast Series. Thank you so
much for tuning in today. I'm thrilled to
be joined by a guest, Vasar Tasimi, the
senior vice president of provider success at Lucid.
Bazar, without further ado, we'd like to welcome
you to the podcast.
Really appreciate you making time for Becker's today.
Thank you, Erica, and thank you, Becker's. I'm
glad to be here.
We're really glad to have you. I know
we'll be diving into the topic of behavioral
health today, which is such an important one.
But before we do, would you like to
say just a little bit more about yourself,
your background, maybe a little bit more about
Lucid as well?
Sure. So I'm like you said, Vissar Tasimi.
I'm the senior vice president of provider success
at Lucit.
I've been with the company for about two
and a half years. Lucit is a behavioral
health
services
organization
that serves over 15,000,000
members across the country in a variety of
of different health plans and direct to employers
as well through our EAP business.
The provider success organization
is an organization that we
renamed,
which in other companies are typically called
network operations
or the like.
But we took an interesting approach here to
name this provider success
because we believe that in order for a
behavioral health business and many other payer services
businesses to be successful, we need our providers
to be successful. And so our mission as
as a department is to empower providers
to treat their patients and do what they
do best and provide them support and services
that they need. So, so that's what we
do here at Lucid from a behavioral health
perspective and and in particular,
the provider success team.
Great. Thank you so much for the overview,
Vasar. It it's great to hear how
your organization is, as you put it, empowering
providers. I think that's so important in this
in this current landscape where in behavioral health,
we're seeing
a really sharp rise in demand for services
and at the same time,
a critical provider shortage.
So in that environment, I'd love to know
from your perspective,
what communication challenges and barriers are you seeing
health plans deal with here, especially when it
comes to engaging their providers?
And why is addressing that so important?
Absolutely.
You know, the the behavioral health provider landscape
is much different than
the, for example, primary care landscape where so
much of the primary care market
is connected to
large facility systems and health systems
that provides
those primary care offices
a lot of administrative support
and, and back end functions to help them
run their business.
In the behavioral health landscape, there's still certainly
a lot of fragmentation
where there are solar practitioners and small partnerships
and certainly large organizations as well. But,
given
the the access challenges
out in the marketplace and the the real
need for
for behavioral health services, it's really important
to engage the whole ecosystem
of behavioral health providers
and try to empower them as best we
can
to be available for for members and and
take on patients and and treat them well.
And so the, you know, the barriers there
has a lot to do with technology,
and processes.
You know, providers are are not just in
the business of being a provider.
They are when they are participating with, managed
care plans,
dealing with the administrative burden of of doing
so. And so think about claim submissions
and
updating their their information and profiles
and everything that they need to do to
appear,
in a provider directory
accurately
and the like. And so what's really important
to the behavioral health network is is offering
them
solutions and support,
whether they are a a solo practitioner
just starting off their business
or part of a large organization,
again, empowering them
to to spend their time and resources on
treating members and and trying to minimize the
administrative burden on their practices.
And, you know, that is,
that is a challenge in that there's
a lot of work that health plans are
are pulled in different directions with their primary
care network, their network
of specialists, their inpatient networks.
You know, the behavioral health networks are are
certainly
as important,
but but are in a sea of of
work that health plans are working on. And
so, again, from a from a Lucid perspective,
you know, we specialize
only in behavioral health, and, this is an
important aspect to make sure that we are
trying to support these providers as best we
can and and embrace them
and their technology and processes and help bridge
those gaps to,
to make sure the providers are focusing on
on doing what they do best, which is
treating their patients.
Yeah. I really appreciate how you described this
behavioral health landscape as fragmented, so to speak.
And it sounds like there's a lot of
opportunities to kind of connect the dots, make
providers more visible,
to their networks. And yeah. So I really
appreciate that overview.
And, Vasari, you mentioned primary care
toward the beginning of your response, and I
wanted to to dive into primary care just
a little bit here. I know that, you
know, some of those initial behavioral health screenings,
like depression screenings, for example, those can take
place in a primary care setting. So can
you share with our audience how primary care
plays a role in that communication and information
exchange surrounding behavioral health? Maybe you could walk
us through an example.
It's a critical channel. You think about
a patient's journey when they may think that
they need behavioral health services for the first
time
in their life.
They may not know what the difference between
a therapist
and a psychologist and a psychiatrist is,
yet there's a pretty good chance that they
have a relationship
with a primary care provider that they've had
for potentially a long
time and and have the trust of that
PCP
to to know where to go when they
have a health issue.
And so,
the primary care channel is is critical in
that they are a a catcher's mitt of
patients who have behavioral health needs. And
so
providing resources
for the primary care channel
in
supporting them to to help them with
patients that they have, their patients who have
behavioral health care needs and letting them know
where to go and what resources are available
to them is is absolutely critical. And so
one of the examples around this, around information
sharing, just just on the front end of
referrals,
and then we'll get to the back end
around what actually happened.
We're working with a a primary care practice
in Florida
that,
is is high volume, has a lot of
patients they see, and and certainly a lot
of their patients have behavioral health care needs.
And
in the,
in the prior scenario,
it's it's really difficult for these primary care
physicians to to try to
to find somewhere to go with with those
patients. And so what we have done is
we connected
with that primary care practice, and we integrated
with their EMR. And so when they see
a patient that has
a behavioral health need,
that PCP knows what to do. They go
into their EMR. They drop down their their
referral
specialty field. And when they get to behavioral
health, we're we're coded in their system, Lucid,
as the first option. And so when they
click that button, they can tell their patient,
okay,
understand your needs. We're gonna get you a
referral. Lucid is gonna be the organization that's
gonna call you and help you get the
care that you need. And so that triggers
a an outreach from the Lucid team to
get in touch with that patient
and screen them and find out what their
care needs are, whether they actually do need
a therapist or a psychiatrist
or or another type of behavioral health care
need
and get them scheduled into an appointment. And
so that that primary care physician knows their
patient is being taken care of, going to
a a visit a
practitioner
that is clinically appropriate from the Haver Health
standpoint
and know that that that patient is going
to get seen in a reasonable amount of
time. On the back end of this, it's
also really important around information exchange that that
PCP also captures the information after that initial
appointment and ongoing, you know,
captures the information after that initial appointment and
ongoing
appointments happen to know that, yes, my patient
did go to
to so and so therapist or psychiatrist and
here's their treatment plan. And and Lucid is
in the middle of that,
those transactions
to to connect to the PCP
world and let them know, yes, your patients
are being taken care of and here's where
they're going. So,
you know, we do have a lot of
of members and patients who who can navigate
the system and and land themselves
in favor of health care services directly, but
there's certainly a very large role for the
primary care channel to play
around getting their patients who have behavioral health
needs and a solution for them as opposed
to a,
you know, the traditional method of,
you know, here may be a list of
of providers that we may know in the
community
by,
you know, by a discharge planner or someone
in the office versus
a full suite solution that that someone like
Lucid can offer.
Fascinating.
Thanks so much, Vassar. Sounds like just that
simple practice of integrating
this tool within the EHR, it's really helpful
for both the provider and the patient, kind
of streamlines that,
linkage to care. So appreciate you sharing a
little more detail about that. And I think
that actually
serves my next question serves up my next
question, which which is that I wanted to
know about any other key strategies or resources
that you'd recommend to health plans in order
to better engage behavioral health providers and improve
care, kind of as we talked about. I
know those that integrated e r EHR feature
is one thing, but any other resources or
strategies you wanted to kind of elaborate on
or even just a best next step leaders
can take to drive progress?
Yeah. I think the the way of the
world that we can connect these two systems
is through,
integrated
programs
between the the PCP or medical programs that
health plans
are engaging with their own network and their
behavioral health programs and making sure that these
are not two separate programs, that they are
working together.
And so as I mentioned a little bit
before
in the last example about the primary care
and how we help navigate
members,
into
behavioral health appointments, that that is our
our navigate and connect solution where we are
Lucid is taking the guesswork out of the
patient and screening them and connecting to networks
of providers who are connected into our technology
and providing their real time appointment availability
to
to offer up that that channel for the
patients. But again, the the key there is
that that is not stand alone, that that
is connected to
the the medical networks and the medical programs
and, you know, potentially, in some cases, the
care management
programs
that exist in,
in the health plans medical world. And so
making sure that these members that have higher
care needs are co managed by both their
medical programs and their behavioral health programs and
that there's connectivity there. Because these, again, these
are not exclusive in terms of a patient's
care
needs. They may be diagnosed with a, with
an issue with a diagnosis that that comes
with a behavioral health
burden on that patient, a new cancer diagnosis.
You think about someone's behavioral health care needs
when they just find out about a diagnosis
like that. And so making sure, you know,
again, from the traditional standpoint
that those patients are seeing their oncologists and
have a care plan forward, but they also
need to be assessed for behavioral health care
needs to make sure that they're in a
good place from
a well-being standpoint.
Mhmm.
Yeah. Connectivity really seems to be the through
line here,
in regards to ensuring patients have access to
behavioral health services in the first place, that
they are linked to them, and that,
those services kinda fit into a a more
holistic care plan. So,
Vasari, this has been such an educational conversation.
Really appreciate everything you've shared. Is there anything
that we didn't touch on or any final
thoughts that you wanted our audience to know?
Scott, I would just say broadly speaking, you
know, the the behavioral health community out there
of providers are are wonderful individuals that understand
that this is about the holistic
care of of members
and that they are connected
to the world and not existing just in
the vacuum
of of Vabra healthcare needs. So I'm I'm
so
privileged to work with Vabra healthcare providers
in the markets that that we serve and
the members that we serve and just love
seeing
the the innovation that is coming out of
these channels in terms
of moving forward,
the connectivity,
the integrations
between
technology systems and between
medical and facility systems and behavioral health care.
It's certainly wonderful to see that that these
two worlds are coming together, and I think
that's just gonna be the the best possible
outcome in treating patients. So it's it's a
wonderful time to be in behavioral health care,
and I and I love seeing where things
are going.
Visart, thank you so much again for your
time, for sharing your passion in this field
and for ending your work.
Appreciate you being on the podcast today. Thank
you again.
Thanks for being here. I really appreciate it,
Erica.
And we'd also like to thank Lucid for
sponsoring today's episode.
Listeners, please be sure to tune into more
podcasts from Becker's by visiting our podcast page
at beckershospitalreview.com.