Listen, Mental Health Matters: Don Parker, Hackensack Meridian Health – Carrier Clinic

In the fifth episode of “Listen, Mental Health Matters,” Brian Giebink, HDR’s behavioral and mental health practice lead, speaks with Don Parker, recently retired president of behavioral healthcare transformation services for Hackensack Meridian Health in New Jersey. From schools to group homes to care facilities, Parker describes strategies for bolstering the continuum of care and discusses the critical issue of expanding services for both children and adults in a time of unprecedented need for mental health services.

Episode Transcript

(00:04):
I'm John Torek, and I'm Danny Sullivan, and
you're listening to Speaking of Design, bringing you
the stories of the engineers and architects
who are transforming
the world one project at a time. Today,
we bring you another episode of a special
podcast series on behavioral and mental health called
Listen, Mental Health Matters.

(00:24):
As part of this series, Brian Geebink, behavioral
and mental health practice leader at HDR,
visits some of the world's leading health care
providers for candid conversations
about the challenges they face and the opportunities
to transform the patient and caregiver experience.
I'm Brian Giebink, and I hope that by
listening, the series helps us consider new perspectives

(00:46):
in our quest to create transformational mental health
facilities that improve the quality of life for
individuals and families and promote a shared sense
of community. And now as we recognize Mental
Health Awareness Month, we bring you Brian's conversation
with Don Parker. He's the retired president of
behavioral health care transformation
services at Hackensack Meridian Health's carrier clinic in

(01:09):
Bellemeade, New Jersey.
This is Frank Ebenk. I'm here with Don
Parker at Hackensack Meridian Carrier Clinic. Yeah. I'm
the president of behavioral health care transformation
services. So all of my responsibilities are behavioral
health, but the idea is that we are
in the process of transforming care in each
of the elements that we deliver.
And so during my time,

(01:31):
we've been merged in with the Hackensack Meridian
System for the last five years.
I've had funding, I've had government support, I've
had all kinds of resources,
action.
And so we don't. We go to the
front of the line. During the last year,

(01:51):
I've raised $25,000,000
to build a new children's wing here at
Carrier Clinic.
And
we are going to be delivering care for
younger children, which is something I never thought
I'd be doing in my career. So kids
12 years old. Those children only have 12
beds in the entire state of New Jersey
to go to, which means they back up

(02:12):
on our emergency departments. They don't get the
care they need.
They are unfortunately,
if they're that young and they need psychiatric
inpatient care, it is a serious case.
And so we we have designed an entire
wing of our new facility for 12 year
old kids.
And it will be dedicated
to making sure that

(02:33):
those children can return
whole
back to their families.
Generally, they're victims of some type of trauma.
When you when you have a psychiatric issue,
you have a little bit of nature nurture,
but most mostly,
it's nurture.
And so we we try to get them
in the right place at the right time
and get them going so that their teenage

(02:55):
years, which are usually both formative and challenging,
end up being successful.
You said you raised $25,000,000.
20 5 million dollars. So here's here's the
sources. We got $10,000,000 from government. So Okay.
What I my successor
is going to be and this is not
intuitive. He was the chief of staff or
the CEO of Carrier Clinic. He also was

(03:15):
in charge of government services. So I get
a Rolodex
from him. That's the old term. But I
get a list of connections with him that
is unparalleled.
And during the pandemic, when everybody else was
only focused on the pandemic, we were focused
on getting ourselves ready for what we knew
would be a post pandemic of epic proportions,
and we're in it.

(03:36):
And we're overloaded
every day. I have a waiting list. I
have I have 14 hospitals where I have
emergency room services I'm responsible for for psychiatric
services. Every morning, I get up with a
hundred people waiting in those beds to get
into psychiatric care, in patient care. That means
they're serious.
And so
what we've tried what we tried to do
during the pandemic was anticipate what we would

(03:57):
need,
changed our models of how we treat in
the emergency rooms so that we're quicker. We
use a a empath model. And then we
knew that we'd have to manufacture a whole
cadre of services. So we started on the
outpatient side. We're the one of the largest
outpatient providers in the state. We are the
largest inpatient provider, state and fourth largest in
the country at this point in time. We

(04:18):
have 584
inpatient beds. So that's a lot of presence
in in the inpatient world. But we have
a enormous
capability of interacting with patients given the depth
and breadth of our organization. So we went
right to our primary care and pediatric practices,
and we got federal money to help us
add clinicians into every one of those practice.

(04:40):
We did a hundred and we're now at
a 30
practices.
Social worker in their offices,
doctor sees something, they're all trained to pick
up psychiatric issues that don't necessarily present themselves
during the exam.
They pick them up. They go to our
social worker when they're done. Social worker has
the ability to call in. We have a
telepsychiatry hub around the clock, and they can

(05:01):
call in and get a consult within and
out. And that consult will be with a
pediatric specialist.
And then if they need long term care,
they're coming here to Carrier Clinic. We have
40 plus bed adolescent unit. I also have
a a residential treatment program for a 20
kids, and I have a school,
a private school for children with

(05:23):
psychiatric issues for a 30 students. So we
in any given day, we'll have 250 kids
in the in on the campus.
So they are our primary audience for care
here at Carrier Clinic. That's really great. You
mentioned a couple of things here that really
caught my attention. The first one was you
mentioned during the pandemic, you were really looking
forward beyond that to to solve that. And
you changed your model. Specifically, you mentioned the

(05:45):
ED, the empath. You went to the empath
model. Right. Can you talk a little bit
more about the empath model? And we understand
generally what the the architecture is of the
space, but but how did that model change
outcomes?
So what we do rather than doing a
quick diagnosis
and then waiting for somebody else to take
care of you, we take care of you
in the ED. We'll start your care there.
So I've got, again, my telepsychiatry

(06:06):
network gives me immediate access.
So we've got a cart we wheel into
the room or in many of the cases,
we're now installing the screens in the EDs.
We're renovating our EDs to actually accommodate the
empath model. And so it makes it real.
It's not a small screen on a cart
anymore, most of them. We also redesigned
several of our EDs to be functional

(06:28):
interactive
capability. And then we built interactive into our
new inpatient unit for children. We're doing now
in the EDs so the kids can gamified
a lot of what we do. So we've
done that. We did the pediatric
program. We now are adding beds here at
Carrier Clinic. We brought on a number of
additional therapists. During the pandemic, we started 64

(06:49):
new residences. We had residents here. We have
our own medical school, or our medical students
get more opportunity to get into residencies in
psychiatry. We met that demand. We added 17
fellowships.
Those fellowships, six of them are for adolescents.
So we have our own supply. We do
a program called we invest in you

(07:09):
in your last year. We give you a
stipend, which would be equal to to your
sign on bonus if you're going on the
private way into practice,
and we give it an increment. So you
start making money, or we call it earn
while you learn
during that last year. We lock you in.
We know exactly when you're coming. We know
when we can expand. We're not out recruiting.
We're not using local tenants. There are people.

(07:30):
We've trained them. They've been through our system.
They're ready to go. So we can do
things faster. We don't have to go through
the normal kinds of things that people have
to go through. We bought two nursing schools.
Nurses every nursing group rotates
through carrier clinic. And they had do all
their psychiatric
rotations with us out of our nursing schools.
I've started a certification process for mental health

(07:51):
technicians
at all the local community college. I'm vice
president of a board of a community college.
I'll be president-elect next year. We developed and
started the curriculum, gave it to the three
junior colleges using it, getting them certified
so that they can make more. So a
certified MHD makes more than an MHD, and
they're trained, and they've got greater skills, and
they're better in our managing our milieu. So

(08:13):
that we built the capability. In our job,
we knew we could build faster
your capability than we could build buildings. And
then we've looked at a whole variety of
different ways that we can move you outside
of the system and keep you from entering
an institutional world. I have always believed notwithstanding
the fact that I've built and run institutional
programs that as soon as we get you

(08:33):
in an institutional world, we train you to
live in one. And if you're gonna be
living in an institutional world, it's not likely
that you're gonna wanna leave it. And if
you do leave it, you're gonna wanna come
back. It's safe. It's safe. You could get
up every morning and not have to worry
about where your meal's coming from, you know,
who you're gonna be interacting with, whether you're
gonna go to school. Your choices are limited
when you're in an institutional world, but many
people adopt to that, which is what happens

(08:55):
with prisoners. I that's why I started my
world in corrections.
I believe in we used to, you know,
don't wait, reintegrate was our model. And so
we got you out quickly, and we do
that here. We on our campus, we opened
up another group home during the pandemic,
took a house that was the president's house
here, and we turned it into a group
home for young women who are who are

(09:16):
transitioning from institutional world out into the real
world. And so they're going out to college,
and they're working and they're cooking and doing
all the things that they need to take
care of themselves, and then they graduate a
year later from us. So we built another
group home over there. It was so successful.
So we kind of taken this campus and
reshaped it all so that it can meet
your needs at just about every level of

(09:38):
psychiatric care that you may require during your
adolescent year. Incredible. You're really covering the whole
continuum of care. We talk about the continuum
of care a lot in in our work
as architects, but it's in the community. It's
in mental health. You mentioned the school. The
school is a very, I think, unique piece
to the continuum of care, and it's at
the top of all of our minds, especially
in k 12 area. There's a lot of
kids struggling with whether it's at home or

(10:00):
academics or friends, and there are a lot
of mental health challenges that come along with
that. And then in the higher education setting
as well, we hear it's it seems like
constantly in the news. There's every day, there's
another sad story coming from a university campus.
Can you explain a little bit more about
where the idea for the school came from
and how that works on your campus. You
obviously have teachers, so you have trained education

(10:21):
professionals.
Are there also social workers in the room?
Are are there mental health professionals? The way
the school is organized is that obviously have
small classrooms. That's really important. So our ratios
are generally seven to one. In addition to
the teacher, every two classrooms has a social
worker assigned to it. And the social worker's
offices opens up into the classrooms. And anytime
that somebody's having a tough day, very quietly

(10:43):
will whisper to Don,
go over just go over checking with your
social worker. That social worker is attached to
you for all four years. We have very
little turnover in our school. So it's a
great place to be and people enjoy working
there and they can see the results of
their work, which is hard to do in
most jobs in behavioral health. And
that proximity
allows this social worker to be part of

(11:04):
your class without it being stigmatized. You don't
have a social worker in there working with
you while the teacher's teaching. Teaching owns the
classroom. You're there as a social worker to
aid and abet and to deal with issues
that come up in them. We don't take
you out of the classroom. You're part of
that. That's the milieu that you're in. And
then that creates a more effective way, we
think, to manage the behavioral issues that come

(11:26):
there. And we don't take a teacher who's
not even if they're specially trained, that's not
their career.
So their ability to do what a social
worker does is not the same. Some of
our teachers are great at it, but not
everybody. And so this assures that we've got
quality and that we've got long term relationships
and those social workers are working with the
kid for up to four years. I mean,

(11:46):
we've got kids that come in ninth grade
and spend their entire high school career. And
and now several years ago, we opened up
a a middle school. So we're taking seventh
grade to to twelfth grade.
And we do things like every student plays
an instrument. That instrument
playing, it creates growth. It creates
new ways of thinking about things. It takes
engrams in your brain and connects them that

(12:08):
other things don't do. And so we do
music therapy,
but the playing in the band has a
it's a different level of camaraderie as well.
And our teacher is spectacular.
We have an incredibly dedicated staff. We have
almost 1,400 staff on the campus. And
from the moment that you come on our
campus, you're gonna feel differently. Now I've got
two buildings that are coming down. I'm not
gonna be here for the last Iraq. I

(12:30):
wanted to take the whole campus
to a new era, and you've heard me
about investing in the investing the old buildings
in the campus so that the spirit doesn't
go away, only the building.
And so we have two new buildings that
are going up in the coming year. One
is a family resource center. So anybody's coming
here will be able to get family resource
capability. So we're gonna work with you in

(12:52):
a nonthreatening way. You're not going to therapy.
You're gonna be there with a bunch of
other parents, and we're gonna be doing groups
for you and things like that. And then
we'll be taking,
other third party individuals, like teachers, firemen, policemen,
all into that. We do emergency
psychiatric first aid for all of the providers
in the area. We have contracts to do

(13:12):
that to the state and through a grant
that we got. So we make this a
milieu, but the milieu is big.
And the milieu
is diffused because we take from a lot
of different areas. So just about every school
you can go to has somebody that's been
trained by carrier. We're going on concentric circles
farther and farther out because we get farther
and farther out now. That strategy allows us

(13:32):
to have connections that we could call upon
to interact with kids if the kids are
having problems. And it's not us, you know,
somebody's been trained by us. So that makes
a big difference, I think, on whether we
can keep you from returning to Cary. Recidivism
rates are fairly low for an area that
has such a level of chronicity to it.
And then each of the staff here wanna

(13:53):
be here. That's a big difference on a
job.
You don't come to work in a psychiatric
hospital unless you wanna work in it. It's
too tough.
It's too risky.
It's too
emotionally
roller coaster.
It's, you know, it's got a lot of
elements to it that make it tough to
work here. So you better be ready to
work here, and you better be ready to
handle things that are gonna disappoint you. A

(14:14):
lot of victories, but there's also a lot
of disappointments.
And you can't control a lot of that
because it's other things that impact that. So
if you may be a great teacher and
you don't teach somebody,
it's not likely that you're you're responsible for
it. But to get people not to feel
that because we got dedicated people, it's a
fine balance that we've got. Buildings are very
influential on that. Maybe that's where you're going.

(14:35):
I was going to ask, so staff recruitment
and retention is so challenging in all of
health care and behavioral mental health care. It's
even more challenging. You mentioned your staff are
here because they wanna be here, and they're
very passionate about the work. How do you
encourage them? Why are they so passionate? Why
do they wanna be here maybe compared to
somewhere else? I would take it back to
my real experience of being a social worker

(14:56):
when I was eight years old. And so
I went to 11 schools in twelve years.
My father was in the military. He got
transferred every year. I had to go in
and make friends and then leave those friends
usually by the end of the year. Sometimes
I go to two or three schools in
a year. And so I
unwittingly
became a social worker early in my life.
And I found out how to get in,

(15:18):
make friends, and get out without damaging myself.
And I used to share that with my
friends. A lot of meltdowns in military kids.
I have built up a reservoir
of skills
over my career to do that. And
I seek out people that have that kind
of long term commitment to this kind of
work because they're tried and true. And if
I can help them not burn out, which

(15:40):
is frequent in our business, that that's my
job. I don't want you to burn out.
So I've gotta keep it interesting around here.
I gotta keep it beautiful. I've gotta keep
I've gotta keep this an environment that you
can feed off of. And that's where the
architecture from my point of view and that
art itself comes in. I'd be a advocate
of healing art for thirty years. Saw how

(16:00):
it could help
early in my career when I was running
a mental health center and how we decorated
and organized the space.
And I built that into my major
contribution in every place that I've gone. And
so far it's paid off. People that are
here like what we do. I don't spend
a lot of money either. I buy all
the art. I'm probably the largest purchaser at
HomeGoods

(16:21):
that you can ever imagine. They have some
unwittingly
beautiful art and healing art. There's a bunch
of properties about the art that I know
all the HomeGoods in this area and I'll
shop, you know, and go in and buy
stuff. And I also have to have disposable
art because it gets hit, it gets beat,
it gets gets ripped, it gets
flashed. So, you know, you can't invest great

(16:41):
money in that and think that it may
not happen. It happens. Once a month, I
go out hang paintings with the maintenance crew.
And so I'm out doing probably 30 paintings
in a day. I also rotate the art,
so it's never the same in different areas.
So what's a tool for
me? My appreciation for art led to my
appreciation for architecture,
ultimately.

(17:01):
Because in my estimation, it's the same process.
And that you are an artist, you just
draw straighter lines than I do.
So
that makes us kindred spirits. And so I've
every project that I've done, I work art
into the project. And it's really in a
substantial way. I really appreciate what you said.
It's like you changed the artwork over time.
What's hanging on the wall today may not

(17:22):
be there in a year. You're gonna constantly
change it and you're always procuring
more artwork and swapping it out. And I
think there's something about that change that keeps
the environment fresh for the staff. You can't
always change architecture as quickly.
Obviously, architecture has an important role to play
in the environment and the appearance
of the care and Yeah. And all of
that. Art is a simple way to give

(17:43):
the patient some change over time, which I
think is really neat. So my ultimate interest
is to be able to do digital art
around the organization. I won't be here to
guide that, but my colleague, Trish Tool, is
gonna take over from me here at Carrier
will. We will use some digital. We'll still
use what we've been using to try and
true, but because you can't put digital screens
everywhere in a psychiatric hospital.

(18:04):
And all patients don't react to digital in
the same way. So we're gonna be doing
blended art now, and then we'll figure out
whether it has an impact and what goes
on in terms of the maintenance and durability
of the art, and then we'll declare a
strategy.
And that may continue to evolve. When we're
doing a new building, my first build here,
I had a very slim budget. And so

(18:24):
I wanted an outdoor area for all the
patients and their families to be, and I
wanted to put some sculpture in. And so
I had a friend of mine who's a
art officer
keep an eye out for me. She called
me up one day about a month after
we built the building. And it was built
so it's it's inside.
So whatever I was bringing in, it was
gonna be tough to get it in once
I built the place. And so she called

(18:45):
me up. She said, Parker, get down here
with your pay with your checkbook. I got
a piece of sculpture for you. It's called
the Phoenix, and it was on a yard
sale in
Far Hills. Far Hills is a really
high end area.
I jumped in my car, buzz sawed it
down. I didn't get a ticket. I should
have. And and there it is. Sitting. And
it's looks like it's custom made for us.

(19:07):
And so I buy for $1,200.
I get it priced at about 80,000.
And the guy guy he he said, where
where you gonna put this? I said, he
said, give me $1,200. Hundred bucks a month
for for the effort. You got it. And
so
I got the jobber who puts the Christmas
tree at Radio City in every year. He
lives in this area. I said, I need
you. Because I gotta plop this over the

(19:29):
top of the building down into this. He
said, oh, it has no problem. So he
comes in. He charges me $200 to do
it, and it's there. We put a pedestal
up, and it's it's a gorgeous piece of
of art. And so I've I've I've done
that all over this campus. I had an
Amish family come in and build our barn
so it would be unique. And I had
Andalusian horses that were donated by the Rockefeller

(19:49):
family. They used to pull carts up in
the Catskills
and they had an accident and severed the
tethers on the on the back horses. They
rushed their front horses, break the feet of
the front horses, knock a hoof off of
one of them and then they should have
been euthanized. They weren't. The Rockefellers put them
in slings for almost a year, had them
attended to every day, rebuilt their hooves, got

(20:11):
them back and then trained them as equine
therapy horses and donated them to us. And
Andalusian horses cost about $300,000
a horse and they gave them to us.
And they are stunning. They are just and
they're huge. I've had two other horses donated
to us, airplane Thorpey. I have donkeys, I
have goats, I have peacocks. And so the

(20:32):
patients love it. You know, we don't ride.
Everything's about guiding a horse through activity. It's
one of the highest ranked things. At night,
I have harp players come in. I have
eight harp players that come in every night
and they play
a small harp and they play music for
our patients. So we took our sleep scores
from here to here. We raised them by
about 40 points. And so our patients all

(20:54):
comment. It's usually the number one thing that
they comment about. It actually has a whole
science behind it. Science is called vibroacoustics.
Vibroacoustics
from a harp player I originally started looking
at this from the harp player's point of
view, and they hold their heart right on
their what's called the thymus gland. Thymus gland
is right on your breastplate, and it tea
treats all the cells in your body. Your
immunologic system is pumped up. When your thymus

(21:16):
properly working,
you won't get sick.
You can thump your thymus. So the religious
activity of thumping your chest, that's about hitting
your thymus gland. And your thymus gland, it
will function again if you thump it periodically.
When you're under a lot of stress, thymus
shuts down. That's the connection between stress and
getting a cold or something like that. That's
the physiologic connection.

(21:38):
Also, the fiber acoustics from it, from the
harp music
hit
the patients. They actually go out to the
patients. No, there's no magic in this. This
is just the music. And some music you
process from your ears and heart music you
process from your thymus gland. And so our
patients, we don't have a lot. We didn't
have a lot of COVID. We had COVID,
but we didn't have a lot of it.
And patients come and usually get better when

(22:00):
they're with us physically
because I I attribute it to this heart
disease.
I have an open mind. I'm right down
the street from Princeton. I can bring the
Princeton folks, and we do a lot of
research together. They don't have a hospital, so
I have a lot of students that roll
through here. Students add to the environment. They
come back with ideas. They help us in
a variety of different ways. You're creating a
village here, and the village has a lot

(22:21):
of different talent, skills,
and people that are involved in it. They
all find a way to work together to
make this happen. The context and the tenor
of everything that happens here is constantly evolving
though as a result of that. This is
incredible, John. You're you seem to have a
very holistic
campus. Right? You're investing the continuum of care.
You're providing equine therapy, heart therapy, if we

(22:43):
can call it that. You have artwork. Do
you have Peacocks. You have peacocks. You have
compassionate staff.
What are some of the challenges
that you've had to overcome to get here?
So one of the things is I have
a high energy, and
the staff that I hire generally have high
energy levels. And if they don't have one,
they find one to keep up with me.

(23:03):
And this is not about me, but because
I'm here as a CEO, you should be
influencing
every aspect of the treatment from the hiring
all the way to the fortunately firing, but
you also every step in between. And that's
motivating people, that's putting the right people in
the right positions, that's mentoring people so that
they can take the right positions, that's having

(23:25):
interaction with them around their families, knowing their
names. It's being
intense. I'm up here by myself during the
week. My wife
my schedules are pretty crazy. I put a
lot of hours in. I'd stay up here.
I have a house down in South Jersey
about a, hour and forty five minutes from
here. And my wife calls it absence makes
a heart grow founder stage of our marriage.
That's why we're so married after forty five

(23:46):
years. So but I could work
from early morning till late at night with
them then. I don't know that I do
you know, I I don't do that every
day, but I do it a lot of
days. Days. You addressed stigma a little bit.
You mentioned that. I think another big barrier
is funding. You're doing a lot of amazing
work you have. It sounds like you're contributing
Yeah. Out of your own pocket. Yep. The
artwork you probably know about. Can you talk

(24:06):
about funding a little bit and how you're
able to
financially support everything that you're doing? So when
I came here, I have always run programs
with financing challenges
and wherever I've been. And and I've done
a bunch of different things. I was a
court administrator for a number of years running
court systems.
And I've worked on the behavioral health side.
I've worked on the hospital side. I've worked

(24:28):
for a company called Atlantic Care down at
hospital down in South Jersey. I ran all
the businesses outside of the hospital. I created
all different kinds of things. I never look
at something in a usual way. I open
up the first convenient care. Convenient care is
minute clinics, things like that. In New Jersey,
I opened the first ever in grocery stores.
And so what I wanted to do with

(24:48):
convenient care was influence your food intake. Food
hurts,
exacerbates, and heals medical conditions and psychiatric conditions.
And so I had a partnership with ShopRite.
I placed centers in ShopRite right near the
checkout area. And so you could walk through
with your cart, and our nurse practitioners were
trained on nutrition

(25:09):
and could look in there and say, hey,
Don, that's not good for you, man. Why
don't you try this? And the customers loved
it. You know, we went through with ShopRite
and put labels on all the aisles. And
so you shop My mother used to shop
once every two weeks. We shop three times
a week. We're generally going in, getting food
for tonight, maybe tomorrow night if we're lucky,
and then count. So we're we're in there

(25:31):
a lot. And if we wanted to help
you overcome your diabetes, your congestive heart failure,
you go down the list, it all has
a food connection. And so we were able
to speed up the trip because you don't
have to read any of the labels on
anything. You just pick it out because it's
got our, I've had our my cardiologist go
through from our health system. It's endorsed by
them.
And then if you had any concerns, you

(25:53):
could have our nurse practitioner check it out.
Instead of giving you medication, I went to
all of the large manufacturers
of nutraceuticals.
And I said, I need from you large
discounts so I can get everybody
taking your nutraceutical.
And so
I got them. And I could get you
started instead of penicillin, I could get you
started on something that was gonna build your

(26:14):
resistance.
And I gave you a coupon that paid
for half of the product. We were part
of your life. What a better place to
be part of your life than in your
grocery store. So I use that same principle
everywhere. I look at what's being done. I
look at ways to do it differently from
the design point of view
all the way to the operations.
And then I go about changing it. And

(26:34):
I'm a change agent,
but I'm a relentless change agent. And here,
doing a psychiatric hospital
starts with what I've designed.
It is
incumbent upon me to find funds as one
of my major jobs to make all of
those things happen. And so that means government
relations, that means

(26:55):
private citizen relationships, that means organizational
activity,
all of which end up producing things. One
of the best things I've done is have
my successor
come from that world. That was his world.
And so everybody's saying, well, wait a minute.
He doesn't have experience in behavioral health. I
said, no. He's got experience in getting money
so that you can deliver the behavioral health

(27:15):
and you're the expert. He's not gonna pretend
that he's the expert. His job is to
get this funded, get and so we we
during the pandemic, we nailed money down because
people were worried about just immediately dealing with
the pandemic. We knew and I'll just give
you one example of this. In the Erickson's
eight stages of growth, he's a psychologist you
probably had in your in your psychology class.

(27:38):
The first one is trust versus mistrust. It
happens between
one and three years old.
And during that time, for the most part,
children are nonverbal. So it's actually zero to
to three. And their test that they have
to solve is trust versus mistrust. And if
they're nonverbal and then your parents and influencers
are wearing a mask, they lose 80% of

(28:00):
the communication.
So I think we have just begun to
see what's gonna happen with our children.
Erikson's theory, and I don't believe completely in
this, says if you miss that, that becomes
something that haunts you the rest of your
life. You either trust you much or you
trust you little. And you can see that
in people. If they've had a very tough
childhood and they've not been able to trust
the people around, they're suspicious all the time.

(28:21):
They don't love like the rest of us
do. They don't interact the way. And on
the other side, you you're gullible or if
you if you if you love too much,
you trust too much. And so what happens
on each of those stages that kids are
going through during a pandemic when we've changed
the conditions? Body language, incredibly important.
We worked on clear things to wear when
we're interacting with paid people because we knew

(28:43):
our body language was important for them. Subtle
change,
profound impact, we think. But we only work
with the people we had. There's millions of
people out there that are gonna be needing,
I think, psychiatric issues. And that's why I
think we're gonna have a post pandemic pandemic.
We're in it that you've seen now with
everybody's interest in building and
and changing and, you know, investing in behavioral.

(29:05):
As you reflect on your career, you're two
days away from retiring. What are some of
those things that you could reflect on or
share with others? Your big ideas, your big
lessons. So my big ideas aren't stopping. So
I have an encore career that has already
been planned over the last year. And it's
been influenced by my own personal experience. I
lost my oldest son. He was in the
marine corps, was in Iraq, got PTSD,

(29:27):
tried to cure himself drinking.
And at 49 years old, he finally his
body gave up. And I we buried him
two days ago.
And I have always had an affection
for substance abuse treatment. And so I'm I'm
launching
a company
with another partner of mine
called Recovery Numb.

(29:49):
Our addiction treatment
is so
ineffective.
And it's not the providers themselves, it's how
we provide it and where we provide it.
And we take you out of your environment.
It's like taking you to the hospital and
expecting you to recover completely
while you're in the hospital if you got
had broken leg or, you know, spinal surgery.

(30:09):
We keep you for thirty days and there's
some kind of magic that's gonna happen during
those thirty days. And I have a drug
and alcohol
facility here, but we do it differently.
So what we're gonna do
is you need detoxing.
If we could do it as non complex
detox, we'll do it in your home. If
if it is complex, I'm probably gonna send
some specialists into your home via telus telemedicine.

(30:29):
And then we're gonna monitor you. I've got
monitoring systems that we can monitor your vitals
completely. While we're monitoring your vitals, though, we're
going to have a profile of you from
when you were coming out of addiction to
when you're
at least temporarily
detoxed.
And so we then have that profile for

(30:51):
monitoring
constantly, and we can always tell by where
you are on your vitals,
where you are in your recovery.
And so we're we're going to
assign a coach to you for an entire
year. That coach will orchestrate your treatment.
And whether it's medical treatment or psychological
or it's educational, they will help you with

(31:11):
that. And then then we will, along the
way,
bring you in for intensive outpatient,
weekends,
maybe weeks, depending on what you need and
how your recovery is going on. It'll all
get customized for you. And for the price
of that thirty days, we'll take you through
a year. The difference in recovery rate from
taking somebody thirty days with an eighty percent

(31:33):
relapse in that first year, if we can
keep you sober for that year, it's four
times more likely in the future that you
will stay sober.
So we'll take the success rate from twenty
percent to seventy to eighty percent with that
model. And then we're gonna be perfecting all
along the way the things ways we interact
with you using technology,
and the technology will be the secret for

(31:54):
us. And then we'll have intensive outpatient locations
around the state. I'll have a couple if
I was just getting right before you guys
came in. I'm negotiating with a team that
has four inpatient units kind of sent located
around the country that we'll use if you
need to actually go to some place for
a little bit for a retreat. But it'd
be a retreat, not a treatment.
And so we're gonna reinvent the addiction field.

(32:16):
And I've got a partner who runs a
program called Medically Home, and his
superstructure
is so good. I was speaking at a
conference in DC at the Leadership Institute
back in December.
And at the end, I was talking a
little bit about recovery at home and what
we're thinking about doing. I'm doing it also
in partnership with Hackensack Marine, and they're gonna
be one of the investors.

(32:36):
And I said, you know, here's the here's
how we're gonna play this all out at
the end. The guy who owns medically home
came up to he was in the audience.
He had spoken earlier in the day. He
said, Parker, meet me at the bar tonight
at 07:00. He said, I know it's not
the right place to meet, but meet me
there. And so I did. And we spent
five hours. We closed the bar down, yeah,
talking about this, how we could work. And

(32:57):
he's got a chassis. He had chassis. He's
got the top 100 hospitals. He's got 80
of them in the portfolio already. He's got
emergency response systems built in. So I'm gonna
use that chassis and then customize it for
addiction.
And he also lost his son. Same kind
of situation as mine. Same military background, same
everything. Almost was

(33:17):
like you were destined to be in that
room that day. The Greek call at Kairos,
right place, right time,
right opportunity. Well, Don, thank you very much.
This is very insightful.
And I I think all of our listeners
are gonna have a lot to talk about.
Well, I had a you know, I had
a really good time.

(33:51):
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(34:12):
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