In this episode we hear the second half of the conversation with Franklin County Public Health Director, Scott LaVigne, in which he shares his views on the role of properly addressing behavioral health, providing a positive patient experience, and the importance of partnerships, and how these elements, and others, work together in order for his team to provide holistic care for patients.

I want to go back a little bit to something you mentioned earlier. So we talked, you talked about the needs-based care, what I call the contextualized care and Medicaid is very focused on serving the whole patient, right, which includes some of those social determinants of health. And, and we've talked about access and access to behavioral health is really important. How's Franklin County Health Partner Department partnering or attempting to partner with other agencies to address these needs?

Well, one of the things that when I first came down here that that I just said we really needed to do was get our medical staff. And by that I mean everyone from the person that greets somebody when they walk in the door and checks them in to the person that works through everything with their, their claims and submitting and all the financial pieces of all that interaction from start to finish and everything in between that we had a trauma informed and, and with a focus on integrating behavioral health and, and behavioral health is a broad term. I should probably break that down because it's used a lot in different contexts. I don't look at it as a way of, of sanitizing mental health. So I look at it as a collection of mental health and substance use disorder and, and really what we wanted to focus on here and it and it goes to the social or social determinants of health. We wanted to focus on the whole patient, not just one aspect of that patient. I know I don't think I've ever heard of patients say that they felt their life was better because they met all their HEDIS metrics.

Me either, by the way.

But what, what we did and what I, I did do almost immediately was we purchased an outcome measurement tool because I knew that one of the things that we want to do is we didn't want somebody to have all their screenings done, you know, meet all those metrics like that on the healthcare side, but have housing insecurity and be living in domestic violence and to have substance abuse and mental health problems. Because I know as a mental health provider and a substance abuse provider in my background history that most of the people that show up in emergency rooms with preventable emergency room presentations are people that have mental health and substance use disorders and other things on board or have experience childhood trauma. So we knew that if we didn't look at that whole picture and integrate that in, we were going to have a hard time doing that. So we pulled an outcome measurement tool from behavioral health. It's called the DLA 20 and it, it focuses on 20 areas of a human's existence. And we wanted to make sure that if somebody experienced a good positive health outcomes, that translated into all these other areas as well. And that became our outcome measurement tool. So that was a big piece of what we focused on. Let's see. The other thing I mentioned already was we wanted to do more screening. We, you know, we do screenings routinely as a health department. We have to spend more time with patients because of our funding than providers in the community do. That is a blessing because we have budgeted time to take into account all of what we need to do, and that fits very nicely with a more holistic approach. So it really wasn't causing us to suffer a lot in the volume department. And we focused all our efforts. And I told everybody here, you know, one of the things we want to focus on is the equation of value. And yeah, you got to have a certain amount of volume to make that equation...