By Lorraine Riche
I couldn’t be more excited to introduce you to the new Bloom Health Centers. I’ve spent my entire career in health and human services, during which time I’ve served as a clinician, an operator, advocate, and executive. It’s true that doing something you love never gets old. Yet, sometimes the industry you serve can get old and in desperate need of change. Sometimes generational approaches to our shared struggles need to be rethought, retooled, revamped. There are those times when a bit of disruption–even in a space we know well–is the best thing that can happen for everyone involved.
We’re living in one of those times. As we’ve all struggled to work through an unprecedented season of isolation and interruption, the need for mental health services has skyrocketed. The good news? More of us are openly recognizing, together, the need we have to improve our own mental health. And we’re seeing these kinds of conversations happen at a national level and scale. The problem? Far too many of us still feel alone in that struggle and uninformed as to how we can begin the journey of change. Add to that the complexities of mental healthcare and the scarcity of qualified providers per capita, and we face another crisis in the making. In response, new approaches to delivering care and matching patients with providers have sprung up, in some cases overnight, all over the country.
At Bloom, we applaud the new recognition of our need for accessible mental health services. We’re grateful that more opportunities now exist to address these needs, and we’re happy that so many providers are getting creative and pushing the envelope with how their services can be delivered and how their costs can be covered.
At Bloom Health Centers, we are committed to disrupting the old ways of doing things. We’re tired of hearing stories of patients waiting weeks, even months to see a qualified professional when they’re in crisis. We’re tired of patients having to come up with their own cash to cover the care they need. We’re also tired of seeing qualified professionals like psychiatrists, therapists, and other mental health providers flying solo because they can’t afford to operate under the current payer systems and structures. While their patients stand in line, they are forced to spend too much valuable time on administration and revenue management and are stretched too thin to fully help the people that only they are qualified to help.
Bloom is here to change that, and we’ve done it by taking several critical steps.
- We’ve designed a unique Care Team model that brings together qualified professionals who design a custom care program for each patient, allowing them to communicate, collaborate, and ultimately improve patient outcomes. This is a vast improvement on older, more siloed approaches where psychiatrists and therapists seldom communicate.
- We’ve developed an innovative technology platform that quickly matches patients in need with a provider uniquely qualified to help them. This automated technology platform runs behind the scenes, allowing our staff to focus on people as much as possible.
- By accepting all insurances for the care we provide, we’ve removed barriers to getting the help that too many patients just couldn’t get around. Taking this approach provides an added benefit to our eminently qualified professionals: We handle the tasks of revenue cycle management and other key administrative functions so that they spend more time with their patients.
- Importantly, we provide our patients with the simple beginning they need to start their journey toward better mental health. We answer our phones. How about that for starters? And in that first contact with our patients, we begin delivering on our mission: giving them hope for what’s next.
Our name and our brand are new. But our leaders, providers, and staff that have come together around this effort are no strangers to mental health care. It has been our careers, our passions, and our lives’ work. And now, Bloom Health Centers represents a brand-new vision for an industry we love.
By disrupting an old system, we believe we’re making mental healthcare better. Better for our patients and better for providers. Better–for everyone involved. Access to all. Frictionless delivery of care. Better benefits to everyone in the provider community.
So welcome to Bloom. Join us, and stay tuned for the great things that lie ahead of us. We have an amazing vision and great plans to make it real.
It’s all about better mental health. And this is where we begin.