Uplifting Rural Behavioral Health: Leveraging Grants for Lasting Impact

In our podcast, “Uplifting Rural Communities,” Amy Herschell, PhD, associate vice president, Program Implementation and Evaluation, Community Care Behavioral Health Organization, and Jessica Meyers, MSEd, senior advisor for implementation, UPMC Center for High-Value Health Care, discussed the important grant-funded work they do to address disparities in behavioral health care in the rural and underserved communities they serve, against the backdrop of National Recovery Month.

Here they go more into why grants are necessary to growing tailored programs for these communities that work hard to address the complex physical and behavioral health care needs of these communities’ residents and provide advice for organization who may be seeking funding of their own for similar initiatives.

This transcript has been lightly edited.

Transcript

Please tell us about yourself and your work with UPMC.

Meyers: I'm the senior advisor for implementation at the UPMC Center for High-Value Health Care. I get the distinct honor and privilege of working closely with our internal and external stakeholders to secure and implement and evaluate grant-funded projects, specifically in rural communities.

Herschell: Hello, my name is Amy Herschell. I am the AVP of program implementation and evaluation for Community Care Behavioral Health Organization of the UPMC Insurance Services Division. Community Care manages the Medicaid funding for behavioral health for 43 of Pennsylvania's counties. We cover about 1.2 million lives, so 1.2 million members, and I have the good fortune of working with teams to understand more about the outcomes for those members, as well as our program implementation around school-based services and evidence-based practices.

What advice would you give to managed care organizations looking to apply for grant funding to enhance behavioral health outcomes in their communities?

Meyers: I would say that this type of collaboration isn't just a way of keeping the target population in mind. It actively involves them in cocreating solutions, and it not only helps to keep everybody engaged, but also helps to avoid some of the most common challenges. It can be very time consuming and resource intensive to implement the right solution and results in more innovative and creative solutions. Through that collaboration is key to working through and doing this work with grant funding to enhance behavioral health outcomes in rural communities.

Why are grants such an important part of the work that you do?

Herschell: They are an important part because we really want to work with our community partners to deliver the most innovative care and the most effective services to our members. The grants really help us to make sure that those 2 goals are in place, and so the grants help us not only to think through what gaps are in services and fill those gaps or needs, but also to make sure that the services are as innovative and state-of-the-art. And they help us also to sometimes have additional resources to evaluate the outcomes of services—so the grants give us the extra evaluation resources, and by resources, I mean sometimes it's the staff time and effort and availability to be able to do the more sophisticated evaluations that accompany grant applications. They really help us to understand how well our programs are functioning.