Healthcare Innovation Awards: Center for healthcare Services

Abstract

The Center for Healthcare Services in San Antonio, Texas, received an award to integrate behavioral, mental, and primary healthcare for a group of approximately 260 homeless adults in San Antonio with severe mental illness or co-occurring mental illness and substance abuse disorders, at risk for chronic physical diseases. Their intervention will integrate healthcare into existing behavioral health clinics, using a multi-disciplinary care team to coordinate behavioral, primary, and tertiary healthcare for these people—most of them Medicaid beneficiaries or eligible for Medicaid—and is expected to improve their capacity to self-manage, reducing emergency room and hospital admissions, and lowering cost, while improving health and quality of life and with estimated savings of $5 million over three years. Over the three-year period, the Center for healthcare Services’ program will hire and train an estimated 22 healthcare workers, to include two health navigators, ten community guest specialists, and six certified peers support specialists. The care team will provide peer support to generate readiness for change, build motivation, and sustain compliance.