The Mississippi Hospital Association (MHA), located in central Mississippi, comprises over 100 hospitals, healthcare systems, and care providers, including behavioral health. The MHA Health, Research and Educational Foundation is the 501(c)(3) non-profit foundation for the MHA. Our consortium members are hospitals located in the 10-county region in which we are focused.
This 10-county region is rural, poor, and has a diverse population. Over 300,000 people live below the poverty level and face socio-economic issues such as little-to-no public transportation, limited access to primary care and specialty services, and a scarcity of social service and health care providers, particularly behavioral health. The highest population of American Indians in the state, the Choctaw tribe, mostly reside in 3 of the 10 counties. Data indicated that this region also had a high rate of emergency department (ED) encounters for substance use disorder/opioid use disorder (SUD/OUD).
Hospitals across the state routinely board behavioral health patients in EDs because of lack of inpatient beds and community service coordination. MHA, in partnership with Care Continuity, developed the only true statewide health information exchange (HIE), giving providers a tool for improving care coordination for behavioral health patients seen in EDs. Eliminating gaps in follow-up care and improving response times to community providers allows patients to move out of the EDs and into more appropriate community care.
Hospitals across the state, including the 10-county region, are connected to transmit admission, discharge, and transfer data as well as provision clinical charts. To date, all acute care hospitals in Mississippi, other than 2 critical access and 2 rural hospitals with 31 beds or less, are connected to IntelliTrue. Community mental health centers (CMHCs) in Mississippi have mobile crisis response teams that are required to respond within one hour (urban) or two hours (rural) of notification of need. Because of turnover and lack of resources in hospital EDs, notification from EDs was either non-existent or spotty at best. Once parameters are set, CMHCs can receive notifications of their patients’ ED encounters from across the state. EDs are also able to use the system for referrals. Crisis mobile response teams can support clinical care teams during extreme situations and begin to shift utilization patterns from acute to ambulatory.