HLTH 2023: Behavioral Health Takes Center Stage

“Our team was gratified to witness how behavioral health has become one of the hot-button topics at HLTH.”

Andrew Cylkowski – Chief Commercial Officer

Our Lucet team recently had the opportunity to play a leading role at HLTH 2023, which has quickly become the health tech industry’s most important gathering. This year’s event was perhaps the most impactful yet with an impressive array of industry leaders, innovations and thought-provoking panel discussions. We were honored to host a panel with expert industry colleagues, as well as demonstrate Navigate & Connect for behavioral health integration in elevating health care delivery in an impactful and cost-effective way.

Our team was gratified to witness how behavioral health has become one of the hot-button topics at HLTH, even taking the main stage with Howie Mandel, Going Digital Behavioral Health Tech’s founder Solome Tibebu, and NOCD’s CEO and founder Stephen Smith. This is a welcome change —  traditionally, mental health has been largely overlooked in broader health care conversations. Based on what we saw and heard at HLTH, it has now emerged as a top priority among both payers and health plans.

And no wonder: the mental health epidemic is the ‘crisis of our time,’ according to the U.S. Surgeon General. More than one in five U.S. adults are currently living with a mental illness and over 60% of adolescents with serious depression are not currently receiving treatment. As health care leaders and other stakeholders grapple with these challenges, breakthroughs in technology and AI, revamped care delivery models, and innovative digital interventions are paving the way to better care accessibility.

How Technology is Unlocking the Front Door to Address Our Nation’s Mental Health Crisis

Lucet added to this larger conversation at the conference by presenting “How Technology is Unlocking the Front Door to Address Our Nation’s Mental Health Crisis.”  I was thrilled to moderate this wide-ranging session with top-notch contributors: our very own medical director John Langlow, MD, MBA, Dr. Bipin Mistry, chief medical officer at Alight Solutions, and Susan Solinsky, co-founder of Ellipsis Health. These experts explored the hard truths of the current state of access to behavioral health care, and how technology providers can partner with payers and employers to open the front door to members and ease their journey to mental health services.

Together, we discussed:

• Why health plans should partner with technology vendors. The best way for health plans to increase access to care is by partnering with clinically backed technology partners who are unlocking greater access to care networks.
• AI is an important enabler. AI is a force that is being applied in so many ways. The ability to reduce provider administrative tasks, like collecting family and medical history, will win back time for providers to see and treat patients.
• Employers are a massive piece of the access puzzle. By choosing their health plan’s best mental health benefits, communicating the benefits’ importance to leaders, educating employees on access, and emphasizing workforce mental health as a priority, employers can get more of their workforce into clinically appropriate care.

Solving Access and Improving Outcomes with Navigate & Connect

Beyond just discussing theories to expand access to behavioral health care, Lucet laid out a concrete plan to achieve it.  At our booth, Lucet showed how Navigate & Connect leverages proprietary technology and a clinical model with NCQA and URAC accreditation to connect health plan members to appropriate and available mental health providers. With Navigate & Connect, care navigators provide concierge-level service to assess members’ treatment requirements at the first point of contact. This is accomplished via our technology platform, which uses real-time risk assessment and advanced algorithms to gain advanced insight into member needs.

With Navigate & Connect, care navigators follow a rigorous clinical screening process to determine the appropriate level of care, from self-care to intensive outpatient treatment. They can then connect members to available providers to address conditions ranging from stress and depression to severe mental illness. The platform integrates with providers’ electronic health records and practice management systems, enabling care navigators to schedule appointments in real time during their first call with a member — consistently connecting people with high-quality behavioral health care in less than five days or as little as 24 hours.  

This year’s HLTH conference made clear that the ability to quickly connect people to the behavioral health care is, and will continue to be, a top priority for the industry. At Lucet, we are committed to making that seamless connection possible.

Andrew Cylkowski is chief commercial officer at Lucet, The Behavioral Health Optimization Company.