Some hospitals — such as Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center in New York and Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston — are starting to enlist mental health providers in their medical units, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal.
These leading hospitals have found psychiatrists are able to help address mental and behavioral health issues that impact patients' physical condition and contribute to length of stay during episodes of care. For example, mental health professionals can help stabilize patients in the intensive care unit sooner by identifying and reducing medication-induced delirium early, according to the report.
Some hospitals like NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center embed the psychiatrist in morning rounds. Others, like Brigham and Women's, assign a psychiatrist to staff the ICU. Johns Hopkins began testing a mental health care model this month that creates a small team dedicated to mental health, similar to Hartford, Conn.-based Yale-New Haven Hospital's behavioral intervention team. The BIT is led by a psychiatrist and includes a social worker, nurse practitioner and other mental health provider. Hochang Lee, MD, chief of psychological medicine at Yale-New Haven, told The Wall Street Journal the hospital's BIT model helped reduce length of stay by "a little more than half a day," on average, according to the report.
Other studies reaffirm that mental health professionals can help reduce length of stay, which helps offset the costs of hiring an additional provider. Read the full report here.
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