April 10, 2025 • 29 mins
In the eighth episode of “Listen, Mental Health Matters,” Brian Giebink, HDR’s behavioral and mental health practice lead, speaks with Todd Archbold, CEO of PrairieCare, a physician-led organization in Minnesota that provides specialized mental health services. Their discussion covers the challenges and successes of a private mental health organization in Minnesota, focusing on overcoming barriers to patient engagement and the importance of recruiting and retaining qualified staff. It highlights the organization's commitment to transforming psychiatric health care through innovative programs like the Psychiatric Assistance Line, which provides real-time consultations and support to primary care providers.
Facing the current youth mental health crisis, with many children unable to access appropriate care due to a shortage of treatment options, PrairieCare is working to transform mental health care by raising awareness and creating family-centered programs. They have established the Mental Health Collaboration Hub to enhance resource sharing and support among various agencies. Despite challenges, efforts are ongoing to develop the workforce and invest in community-based services to better serve children and families with complex needs.
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Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
To date, we've now had more than 100,000
(00:03):
individuals receive care. Those 100,000
individuals often have spouses or siblings. They have
parents and guardians, friends, coworkers, neighbors.
That's the message I like to share with
our team members, the multiplier of every life
we can change,
that benefit from the hard work they're putting
in.
(00:24):
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.
As part of this series, Brian Givink, behavioral
(00:44):
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 Geebing, and I hope that by
listening, the series helps us consider new perspectives
in our quest to create transformational mental health
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facilities that improve the quality of life for
individuals and families and promote a shared sense
of community.
So, Todd, thank you. It's great to sit
down with you and hear what you're doing
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in the behavioral health space. If you don't
mind, maybe just share a little about about
you and, your history, with, behavioral health care.
What helped build, your foundation to be a
good leader? Well, thanks, Brent. I I appreciate
the opportunity. I like the opportunity to talk
about behavioral health care, our journey, you know,
the impact we're making and, you know, the
the main messages I want people to know
about, the work that's happening and the services
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people people can receive. You know, my career
started about twenty years ago as a school
counselor. In fact, what inspired me to go
down that path was between my junior and
senior year, I was volunteering at a teen
center in Anoka where at risk youth could
spend more structured time in the summer playing
in the gym and doing board games with
peers. And and there were myself and other
adults kind of supervising. And I remember meeting
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a guy named Mike who was a school
social worker who was spending his summers volunteering
here as well, and just watching the way
he was connecting with kids and helping to
guide them, shape them, just be a positive
role model. I, you know, I joke I
wanted to be like Mike, which was a
lot funnier then because people still remembered Michael
Jordan as as they may not as well
today. But I wanted to be like Mike,
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and I learned more about his career as
a school social worker and ended up going
to Minnesota State Mankato to get my degree
in social work. And I spent a few
years as a school counselor,
loved doing that work, loved working with the
kids, even the team members, the staff, the
teachers, others in the community,
and was also coaching the the diving team.
And I was set. I thought I'd be
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doing that for life. It was a great
gig. I had summers off, met my wife
in the schools as well, so the two
of us had that time together.
Ended up making the switch,
unanticipated,
but moving from the school setting to health
care. And in the schools, you know, a
large part of my the focus of my
work was helping kids maintain, getting them back
to school,
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engaging with education, making sure that they were
safe, supported, had what they needed outside of
school. But the scope of a school counselor
and social worker today is really different. We
have schooling, mental health therapy happening in those
settings, far more assessment services, accommodations happening
now than there were at that point. But
at that point, when I made the shift
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from the education setting to the care and
treatment setting and suddenly found myself surrounded
by therapists and doctors and nurses and psychologists.
Many of them were like mythical creatures that
I'd only communicated with by phone and email
and now they were in my office
And I saw a lot of these same
kids, these previously which had been students of
mine,
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same individuals
as patients getting care
and actually seeing psychotherapeutic
interventions at play, watching them improve, watching diagnosis
be identified,
watching treatments
be incorporated to truly improve their lives and
out of their families was was just a
huge huge kind of moment for me of
really gratification to the field and seeing again
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similar kids getting better.
And so this is all prior to PrairieCare?
Correct. Yep. And so what led you to
PrairieCare? So
as a school social worker, I was, most
recently in the Hopkins School District where I
was, I think, the fifth FTE in that
department,
which was supplemental. I was afforded through discretionary
funds.
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And it was actually not long after that
school year started that the administration let me
know that they probably wouldn't be able to
afford the discretionary social worker come the next
year. So I knew that, you know, my
time at least in that building was sunsetting,
which gave me the opportunity to open my
eyes and and, again, look outside of education,
which I I probably wouldn't have otherwise.
And that's when I found Prairie St. John's,
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which was opening a clinic in Minnetonka at
the time, which was interestingly in the same
area where I was as a school social
worker.
And, the story of PrairieCare really starts in
02/2005 when Prairie Saint John's opened an outpatient
clinic in Minnetonka.
Although PrairieCare wasn't found until 02/2009,
we were originally the Prairie St. John's
offshoot of the Fargo campus that they still
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operate today, but the offshoot in the Twin
Cities.
And what the founders of Prairie St. John's
were realizing in the early two thousands was,
you know, roughly one out of four, one
out of five patients
in the Fargo Hospital were coming from the
Twin Cities.
Oftentimes, these were youth, young adults in crisis,
having to commute oftentimes by ambulance with a
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loved one hundreds of miles away.
Mental health care can be
daunting or at least kind of seem like
an an enigma of a care environment at
first. And to be in that situation and
have to travel that far for care, isn't
okay for any area of health, much less
mental health care. Yeah. So they opened the
site in Minnetonka,
to alleviate the pressure in the metro area,
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but also then allow for step down care
for those who did receive services in Fargo.
So I started there in 02/2006
and expanded over in Woodbury. So we had
outpatient presence in the East And West Metro,
and then it was in 02/2009
that we spun off of Prairie Saint John,
started Prairie Care with the ambition of opening
an inpatient hospital.
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And the state of Minnesota, there's a moratorium
on hospital beds. So in order to expand
even one bed, you have to get legislative
approval, which we received, and we started by
opening a 20 bed children's hospital in Maple
Grove.
And I'll never forget watching our
license come through on the fax machine. It
was that long ago. Department of Health faxed
us our our new license. We were ready
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to open. This was Friday, 02/11/2011,
and it was about 4PM. And that same
evening, we had five admissions.
I thought it was gonna be a week
or two until people even realized we were
open. We were the the first and still
are the only private mental health hospital in
the entire state. At that point, all other
mental health units were embedded in larger centers
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or were state hospitals. So we were suddenly
creating, you know, more direct community access to
care.
And we had five admissions in that very
first evening to the point where it, you
know, overwhelmed our team. Not only the excitement
of being able to care for these individuals,
but we were still, you know, figuring out
our processes, the workflows, and so forth.
It was within a matter of weeks that
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our 20 bed hospital reached capacity.
We were able to get a variance and
expand to 30 beds. We reached capacity.
We then realized we needed to grow and
expand into a larger building, which is when
we moved here in Brooklyn Park on 50
beds
and similarly filled them up. We expanded 71
and now a hundred and one beds. And
and throughout that storyline of growth as PrairieCare,
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we've now reached 10 locations across the Twin
Cities, including Rochester and Mankato. We have a
full continuum of care. It's it's really interesting
in the space,
and then individual
can see their outpatient psychiatrist,
be a part of group therapy,
when or if needed, get higher levels of
care such as partial hospitalization, inpatient hospitalization,
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all in the same system. And that's something
that just hadn't been done before. So our
vision has been to transform psychiatric health care.
And and since day one, it simply been
building access and trying to destigmatize
what oftentimes the barrier, the fear of being,
discriminated, destigmatize that and allow people to get
access and thrive within our continuum. Ty, can
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you give us a high level overview of
Prairie Care? So Prairie Care has services spread
across 10 locations in Minnesota. Our flagship hospital
is here in Brooklyn Park where we have
a hundred and one beds for children, adolescents,
and young adults.
We have a network of eight partial hospital
programs,
and, partial hospitalization is is similar to inpatient
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by way of the treatment program. In other
words, individuals who are receiving hospitalization in partial
hospital get about six to seven hours of
of pretty in-depth psychotherapeutic
programming per day, which includes meeting with psychotherapists,
psychiatrists, nurses.
We have occupational therapists on staff, recreational therapists.
We also offer schooling in all of our
programs for our youngsters.
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But then in our hospital, of course, individuals
will will spend the night, and they're with
us oftentimes about seven to ten days. And
it's to make sure we get a good
psychiatric assessment that we're able to stabilize any
conditions, and make sure that we can truly
get a strong treatment plan in in place
that will go beyond hospitalization,
but through our continuum, which I will then
lean on partial hospitalization is often a step
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down from the hospital.
We then offer intensive outpatient program, which is
another step down to about three hours of
group programming per day and then into our
clinic services, which includes regular visits with psychotherapists,
with evaluations, with psychologists,
psychiatry, and and even some more innovative things.
For example, we offer a transcranial magnetic stimulation,
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something called TMS
at two of our locations.
And And TMS, kind of explain it in
a high level way, is a highly effective
way to manage treatment resistant depression. These are
often individuals who haven't responded,
to multiple antidepressants or traditional psychotherapies.
And it essentially uses magnets, almost like an
MRI magnet, to, I like to say, kind
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of stimulate parts of the brain to kind
of get the juices flowing again, if you
will. And I can't say too much more
without getting out over my skis there, but
it's it's highly effective. In fact, we find
that two out of three patients will see
a reduction of symptoms, of nearly fifty percent
in the in the course of the treatment,
and nearly forty percent of those individuals will
go into remission from their depression.
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So it's been a really neat service that
we've been offering. To date, we've now had
more than 100,000
individuals receive care throughout our services, which to
me, I always ex I like to expand
that. Those 100,000
individuals often have spouses or siblings. They have
parents and guardians, friends, coworkers,
neighbors. Mhmm. And, you know, very quickly, we're
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we're impacting a million people. And that's the
message I like to share with our team
member is the multiplier
of every life we can change
has a a multiplier of of individuals around
them, that benefit from the hard work they're
putting in. You mentioned that you are the
first private mental health hospital.
And are you still the only private mental
health hospital in the state? Correct. We're the
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only private hospital in the state right now.
So I think MHA just produced a report.
There are a 26
hospitals in the state of Minnesota and PrairieCare.
Not only are we subspecialty doing something very
very special and different, but we are the
only private hospital. Does that create any challenges
for you? It's a different paradigm. It's a
different model of health care in that, you
know, at the end of the day, we
are contracted with all the major insurance companies.
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We take Medicaid. We have a large amount
of the prepaid medical assistance plans.
If individuals have a plan that we currently
aren't contracted for, we'll do single case agreements.
So just like every other hospital in the
state, we work very hard to make sure
that ability to pay is not a limitation.
We play by all those same rules. At
the end of the day, we have very,
very similar margins as the other systems. We
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have a lot of our own autonomy, our
ability to raise and manage capital privately as
we see fit. And and that's really been
what's allowed us to, I think, grow and
thrive as we have as a subspecialty hospital
is all of our resources, all of our
attention are focused on providing mental health services.
It seems like there might actually be some
benefits of being the one and only because
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I think especially when it comes to mental
health care, there's a lot of challenges with
funding and reimbursement
and stigma and access and all of those
things. And there are a lot of benefits
of being a sort of you're the one.
Yeah. And I like to say it's all
we do. Right? We're not competing amongst other
departments. We we have an intense focus on
mental health care. You know, I often tell
people PrairieCare is a place powered by people.
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And I don't mean to be silly with
all the p's in there. It just shakes
up that way. But but truly, 75%
of our expenses of of our investment
is our people. And it's everything from recruitment
training, retention strategies,
obviously, salaries and just making sure that we're
a safe, fun place to work. You know,
imagine yourself on your road to being a
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board certified child psychiatrist. You're gonna be in
training for over a decade, you know, starting
from undergraduate all the way through
fellowship. And, you obviously have a passion. You
have a desire to work with a a
special population,
and then you find Prairie Care and you
realize this is all we're designed to do.
Now we do treat all age ranges. We
have a full continuum for for children, adolescents,
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and adults. And I like to say, obviously,
the family unit is also cared for in
there. But, yeah, this is all we do.
It's been a a differentiator, and it's allowed
us to to a sharp focus on the
mission, which which truly is our North Star.
So a lot of organizations have a moment
or a series of moments that define who
they've become. And I think this evolution from
Prairie Saint John's to Prairie Care, that seems
like a pretty pivotal moment and sort of
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a defining moment. You're taking kids as far
away as Fargo Mhmm. And probably beyond. Are
there
are there any other moment that really defined
Prairie Care to what it is today? Yeah.
I think, as you mentioned, that step of
creating Prairie Care, as an independent Minnesota based
organization, and then very quickly opening our first
twenty bed hospital were those defining moments. Suddenly
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we were on the map as a new
hospital, by the way, you know, who who
builds new hospitals? It seems like they're just
around for a hundred years. And we had
the the luxury of building a brand new
state of the art hospital
that really set a new standard for mental
health care as well. And, you know, unfortunately,
Hollywood movies have not done us a favor
in this space when they depict what psychiatric
units and and care looks like. But, truly,
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the space that we've created and designed is
part of the treatment. It's a healing space
for our patients and for our team members,
and I think we have set a standard
where we've seen other health systems kinda replicate
some of those fit and finishes and the
focus on safety, but also a very comfortable
environment to receive care. So I think opening
that first twenty bed hospital was was a
huge defining moment for Prairie Care and for
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our communities, to be honest. And then I
think moving to our larger campus in Brooklyn
Park in 02/2015
was another step up in us becoming a
core part of Minnesota's mental health system. And
then in 02/2022,
we were acquired by Newport Healthcare, which is
an organization based out of Tennessee,
which provides,
residential care, partial hospital outpatient services
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to adolescents and young adults across the country.
So now we are a part of a
system
that has a national footprint,
that has scaled very successfully.
There's also another provider
intensely focused on the mission and providing great
mental health care. What are some of the
roadblocks that you face in in all of
this and have you been able to pivot
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to move these, roadblocks forward? You know, Brian,
you hit on the first one. You know,
us being a private organization has just been
different for the states. And I think that
did draw a lot of scrutiny at first
as we were growing. You know, how how
are you doing this? And and can a
hospital of Minnesota
be private? And I think we've demonstrated that,
yes, we can,
and we can still demonstrate a high level
of integrity. We are still driven by our
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values,
and provide great care, and and we've demonstrated
that, you know, over and over again.
So we persevered through some of those kind
of cultural, even political roadblocks. And, again, it's
been about our north star, our mission, and
just being determined, our focus on mental health
care.
For the the work we do in general
in mental health care, I think there's kind
of three barriers that prevent
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engagement with patients, with our community.
And and the first is actual barriers.
This could be somebody who lacks some transportation.
They lack insurance company, the financial ability to
access services.
The second barrier, as you mentioned, is the
stigma, the fear of being discriminated against. The
thought that if I do receive services, if
I talk about it, if my friends know,
they'll treat me differently, that somehow it's a
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character flaw. And, of course, it's not. And
then the third, and I I think this
is an interesting one, and and this is
my opinion,
is, the barrier that people just don't know
that the services exist and that they're effective.
Our tagline is that mental illness is real,
it's common, and it's treatable.
And those second two are particularly important for
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people to understand truly how common
mental illnesses can be. In fact, one in
four individuals in their lifetime will experience symptoms
of a diagnosable mental illness. Most commonly, that's
going to be an anxiety disorder, depression, or
a mood disorder.
But once people really understand how common mental
illness and and those symptoms can be, they
can start understanding that it is treatable.
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And as you can appreciate,
I like to think of our mental health
on like this four dimensional spectrum of illness
and wellness and just like our physical health,
we're never perfectly healthy. We're always kind of
moving about.
The depth and breadth of mental health is
truly haunting and very complex.
But we can understand that every one of
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us will feel depressed at one point. And
if those symptoms become intense, if they persist,
we need to know that talking to somebody,
receiving cognitive behavioral therapy, or, talk to primary
care about antidepressants
will make us feel better. In fact, eighty
percent of individuals over the course of a
few months as scored by the PHQ nine
or the GAD seven depression or anxiety scales,
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will often feel better after they engage in
evidence based treatment. And if people can understand
that it's common and you can feel better,
I think more people will engage proactively with
mental health care. A barrier you didn't mention,
which I hear often, is staffing. And you
mentioned with your alliteration of the p's, Prairie
care is a place powered by people.
The people that you mentioned, that that is
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key. Right? Yes. Is finding the staff, the
qualified
staff a challenge? Is it a barrier? Or
have you found the magical solution that it's
not a barrier for you? It's not a
challenge for you? Oh, boy. Yes. It's a
barrier. It's difficult finding
the right staff, the qualified staff, and making
sure that we can create an environment where
they can thrive,
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and not burn out. There's not a lot
of folks entering the field. And when the
good ones do, we need to make sure,
again, that we can treat them well and
keep them connected with our mission
so they can thrive. It's hard work. And
I I like to remind all of our
teams from day one and throughout their tenure
here at PrairieCare that you're cut from a
different cloth.
Many of us are are here for a
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reason. We're very passionate. We have a lot
of empathy. We want to see people get
better, and it takes a lot of hard
work and investment
to sometimes get those small rewards, those twinkles
of of inspiration, whether it's a thank you
card or the high five from the kid
who for the last six weeks have been
giving you the stink eye and calling you
dirty names, but knowing that you've truly made
a profound impact in their life. It it
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takes a lot of resiliency
and determination.
So
recruiting,
retaining, and nourishing the workforce
is really hard, and we need to make
sure that all of our leaders understand that
if it's not for our people,
maintaining that resiliency and being engaged, we don't
have a program. That's what we are. What
do you do really well? What does PrairieCare
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do really well? And what are you maybe
doing differently? I think we keep our eyes
open and we listen really well. We understand
the landscape is always changing and it needs
to change. Again, I mentioned before, we're inspired
by our vision to transform psychiatric health care.
And I often tell people that's the vision
because it has to be transformed. We have
to do something different and better. For example,
mental health care gets about 4% of all
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NIH funding and research.
Some have attributed nearly 50% of all of
health care costs, to be rooted back to
mental health or or behavioral health of some
sort, one's ability to engage within the health
system. So we need to invest more in
research. We need to understand that we have
a long ways to go to not only
catch up to the rest of health care,
but really be able to provide the care
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that our communities truly need. So we listen
for those opportunities, and I think we're humble.
We try to be vulnerable at times and
see what different things we can do. And
in the spirit of transformation, there's a few
things we've done that I think have been
a differentiator
and has has really been inspiring to our
team internally.
Number one is many years ago, we started
something called the psychiatric assistance line, and this
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is a a grant funded program through the
Department of Human Human Services where any health
care provider in the state of Minnesota, Monday
through Friday, can pick up the phone, reach
out to us, or they can do this
online, and immediately get a board certified psychiatrist
on the other end of the phone to
consult on a case. We do direct consultations
in real time. We do education to primary
care, and we also help with triage. This
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is a really simple thing, but it's allowed
us to now help thousands of individuals
get care in real time in those primary
care settings,
and ultimately help empower and encourage those primary
care providers to do more as well, give
them the confidence they need to treat sometimes
more complex cases
in their offices. This doesn't happen within our
four walls. This isn't necessarily
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creating more patients or business for us, but
it's the right thing to do, and it's
been energizing for our team. The other thing
that we've been a part of that's been
really fun is a couple years ago, along
with a grassroots movement in the community,
we created something called the mental health collaboration
hub. And we have all heard in recent
years about this boarding crisis. Kids and adults
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as well who are in behavioral health or
psychiatric crisis end up going to hospitals, end
up going to EDs,
sometimes end up going to get county services,
and they end up boarding in these, what
I call, inappropriate care settings. While they might
be safe in a hospital,
they're probably not going to get their immediate
psychiatric needs met, the stabilization they need, and
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certainly not the ongoing healing. And because there's
nowhere else to go, they get stuck and
they board for days, even weeks at a
time. With mental health collaboration hub, when these
cases present,
those hospitals, those care settings can upload de
identified information into a website,
and it notifies all of the appropriate care
providers across the state that there is a
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case that could use your help. Now the
other alternative is that it means
the busy ED staff, the nurses, the the
people in the hospitals and counties
are otherwise picking up the phone, calling, trying
to reach out to care providers to figure
out who takes the right insurance. Do you
specialize in in this clinical treatment modality?
By the way, do you treat 12 year
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olds or only adults?
The hub does all the work. And beyond
the fact that we now in the last
two years have been able to help connect
over 400 kids who've been boarding to treatment,
we've built a community, and a lot of
the people participate in the hub and the
weekly calls that we have for the networking.
And to watch the shift happen where these
boarding settings
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have learned more about not only the mental
health providers, but the treatment modalities and the
evidence based care pathways,
not only to watch that appreciation
increase, but also the compassion that those providers
have for the hospitals and the work that
they're doing has really been kind of enlightening
for us all and really energizing. And and
that's the kind of thing that PrairieCare, I
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think, thrives on outside of our four walls.
The work and the impact that we can
have in the community
through these projects is is really fun. When
I first heard of the mental health collaboration,
I have I just saw that every community
everywhere needs this.
It's only in Minnesota. Correct? Correct. Yep. This
is something that you built just in Minnesota,
and you're not aware of this happening anywhere
(24:06):
else in the country in any other states.
Certainly not in the way this just kinda
spurred through this true kinda grassroots movement of
passionate providers coming together. For sure. And through
my work as an architect, there's a lot
of movement even across state line. When care
isn't provided in one state, some patients might
move to another state for residential treatment and
finding the appropriate level of care in the
appropriate setting. I imagine that there's an opportunity
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or a need for this to expand beyond
the walls of Minnesota. Right?
Absolutely. Is there a vision to do that
at all at this point? The tool itself,
what we've created, the concept
is agnostic to the region, even the condition
of the care setting. Okay. There's nothing that
has or will prevent us from faking it
much bigger other than just our own internal
bandwidth the way the way it is today.
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I've had emergency medicine physicians in other states.
In fact, Washington recently, who I connected with,
talked about doing this for other types of
conditions, other types of emergencies.
To be honest, part of the the spark
for this idea came from the way our
health care communities responded during COVID when we
were desperately seeking capacity, ICU beds, and so
forth. It wasn't acceptable just to send ambulances
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to hospitals to figure out when they arrived
if they had capacity.
We had to do something smarter. It's too
bad that it took that crisis and having
to endure this ongoing boarding crisis to get
us to where we're at today, but it's
truly been transformational.
Any advice you'd have for another community or
another state to start something like this? How
did you make it happen? It's an important
(25:30):
resource that so many kids and adults would
benefit from. I think the key is in
the name collaboration,
and that takes
humility.
There's a great line.
I thought I knew a lot until I
learned a little.
And I think in health care, we have
to understand there's a lot more we don't
know. And, again, whether that's about health care
operations or simply
(25:51):
science and the practice of medicine or just
simply the way we need to collaborate throughout
communities, As I've shared with, stakeholders in other
states about both the psychiatric assistance line and
the mental health collaboration hub, it is interesting
to me that the surprise I hear about
the psychiatric assistance line, wait a minute. So
primary care will pick up the phone and
and call you? They have that humility to
(26:12):
say, hey. I'm not sure what to do
here. Can you help? And similarly with mental
health collaboration hub that every week, we have
thirty, forty, 50 people come together to talk
about a handful of cases to help get
these kids out of those settings.
And that's that's helped kinda reinforce with me
truly, I I think, how special our communities
and specifically health care communities are here in
Minnesota. I wanted to ask a little bit
(26:33):
more about how you've leaned on other partnerships
to build out and grow your services in
your organization. I think the mental health collaboration
hub is certainly one of those connecting to
primary care is one. Mhmm. Are there any
other partnerships that you you really lean on
or leverage to help with growing your behavioral
health services?
Over the years, I think we've counted well
over 30 different partnerships we've had in the
(26:54):
communities. And and again, it's ranging from a
grant funded projects like PAL and the the
mental health collaboration hub, all the way to
formal service agreements where we're providing psychiatric services
in in local school districts, in local primary
care clinics, and even a partnership with Children's
Minnesota to help them launch, back in 2,022.
(27:14):
And I personally have always felt that when
we can find
ways to further
practice of medicine, mental health care, and and
psychiatry, where, again, we know there's a shortage
and we know there's barriers, that we need
to share that with others. And sometimes it's
simply operational procedures. It can be safety measures.
It can be the way we're designing spaces,
(27:35):
but ultimately down to, you know, multidisciplinary
treatment teams interacting in a way that truly
gets to the root of
somebody's condition and that evidence based care pathway.
We love sharing those things. And the more
we share, the more we trust, the more
we support others, the more we see that
in return.
And as we mentioned earlier, initially having seen
(27:55):
some of that scrutiny as the only private
hospital,
that openness and that willingness to collaborate and
help others, I think, has come back to
us in return with the gratitude
and graces we've we've seen in others. I
really love that. It's about sharing and trust,
transparency,
collaboration.
It takes a village.
It takes the whole community.
(28:15):
While I believe that we provide extraordinary care
at Prairie and we are a premier provider,
we don't feel like we need to compete.
We don't feel like we need to capture
market share or outperform others. We want to
be the tide that lifts all ships. Is
there anything else you wanna share? The takeaway
I'd like people to have is what we
like to share. Mental illness is real, it's
(28:36):
common, and it's treatable.
And when people can understand that, when they
can accept that this is a part of
life, and you may not be depressed today,
you may not feel that anxiety today, but
you you might in the future. A loved
one might. With the data being that, you
know, one in four people experience these symptoms,
you or somebody you know quite well will.
And for us to still be open and
talk about those things and have trust that
(28:57):
we can get better is is really important.
That engagement
with health care in a preventative proactive way
is critical. And just know that there's a
lot of compassionate people out there, who can
help ourselves and our our loved ones. Todd,
thank you. This This has been great. I
really appreciate all of your insight,
and I know our listeners that will really
value out listening to this. Thanks, Brian. I
appreciate the opportunity.
(29:20):
For more information on our listen mental health
matters series,
please visit hdrinc.com/listen.
There, you'll find more on HDR's approach to
behavioral and mental health design, meet our team,
and see samples of our work.
If you like what you heard, be sure
to rate us or leave a comment on
on Apple Podcasts,
(29:40):
Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
To date, we've now had more than 100,000
(00:03):
individuals receive care. Those 100,000
individuals often have spouses or siblings. They have
parents and guardians, friends, coworkers, neighbors.
That's the message I like to share with
our team members, the multiplier of every life
we can change,
that benefit from the hard work they're putting
in.
(00:24):
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.
As part of this series, Brian Givink, behavioral
(00:44):
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 Geebing, and I hope that by
listening, the series helps us consider new perspectives
in our quest to create transformational mental health
(01:06):
facilities that improve the quality of life for
individuals and families and promote a shared sense
of community.
So, Todd, thank you. It's great to sit
down with you and hear what you're doing
(01:27):
in the behavioral health space. If you don't
mind, maybe just share a little about about
you and, your history, with, behavioral health care.
What helped build, your foundation to be a
good leader? Well, thanks, Brent. I I appreciate
the opportunity. I like the opportunity to talk
about behavioral health care, our journey, you know,
the impact we're making and, you know, the
the main messages I want people to know
about, the work that's happening and the services
(01:47):
people people can receive. You know, my career
started about twenty years ago as a school
counselor. In fact, what inspired me to go
down that path was between my junior and
senior year, I was volunteering at a teen
center in Anoka where at risk youth could
spend more structured time in the summer playing
in the gym and doing board games with
peers. And and there were myself and other
adults kind of supervising. And I remember meeting
(02:09):
a guy named Mike who was a school
social worker who was spending his summers volunteering
here as well, and just watching the way
he was connecting with kids and helping to
guide them, shape them, just be a positive
role model. I, you know, I joke I
wanted to be like Mike, which was a
lot funnier then because people still remembered Michael
Jordan as as they may not as well
today. But I wanted to be like Mike,
(02:31):
and I learned more about his career as
a school social worker and ended up going
to Minnesota State Mankato to get my degree
in social work. And I spent a few
years as a school counselor,
loved doing that work, loved working with the
kids, even the team members, the staff, the
teachers, others in the community,
and was also coaching the the diving team.
And I was set. I thought I'd be
(02:51):
doing that for life. It was a great
gig. I had summers off, met my wife
in the schools as well, so the two
of us had that time together.
Ended up making the switch,
unanticipated,
but moving from the school setting to health
care. And in the schools, you know, a
large part of my the focus of my
work was helping kids maintain, getting them back
to school,
(03:12):
engaging with education, making sure that they were
safe, supported, had what they needed outside of
school. But the scope of a school counselor
and social worker today is really different. We
have schooling, mental health therapy happening in those
settings, far more assessment services, accommodations happening
now than there were at that point. But
at that point, when I made the shift
(03:32):
from the education setting to the care and
treatment setting and suddenly found myself surrounded
by therapists and doctors and nurses and psychologists.
Many of them were like mythical creatures that
I'd only communicated with by phone and email
and now they were in my office
And I saw a lot of these same
kids, these previously which had been students of
mine,
(03:52):
same individuals
as patients getting care
and actually seeing psychotherapeutic
interventions at play, watching them improve, watching diagnosis
be identified,
watching treatments
be incorporated to truly improve their lives and
out of their families was was just a
huge huge kind of moment for me of
really gratification to the field and seeing again
(04:15):
similar kids getting better.
And so this is all prior to PrairieCare?
Correct. Yep. And so what led you to
PrairieCare? So
as a school social worker, I was, most
recently in the Hopkins School District where I
was, I think, the fifth FTE in that
department,
which was supplemental. I was afforded through discretionary
funds.
(04:35):
And it was actually not long after that
school year started that the administration let me
know that they probably wouldn't be able to
afford the discretionary social worker come the next
year. So I knew that, you know, my
time at least in that building was sunsetting,
which gave me the opportunity to open my
eyes and and, again, look outside of education,
which I I probably wouldn't have otherwise.
And that's when I found Prairie St. John's,
(04:57):
which was opening a clinic in Minnetonka at
the time, which was interestingly in the same
area where I was as a school social
worker.
And, the story of PrairieCare really starts in
02/2005 when Prairie Saint John's opened an outpatient
clinic in Minnetonka.
Although PrairieCare wasn't found until 02/2009,
we were originally the Prairie St. John's
offshoot of the Fargo campus that they still
(05:19):
operate today, but the offshoot in the Twin
Cities.
And what the founders of Prairie St. John's
were realizing in the early two thousands was,
you know, roughly one out of four, one
out of five patients
in the Fargo Hospital were coming from the
Twin Cities.
Oftentimes, these were youth, young adults in crisis,
having to commute oftentimes by ambulance with a
(05:40):
loved one hundreds of miles away.
Mental health care can be
daunting or at least kind of seem like
an an enigma of a care environment at
first. And to be in that situation and
have to travel that far for care, isn't
okay for any area of health, much less
mental health care. Yeah. So they opened the
site in Minnetonka,
to alleviate the pressure in the metro area,
(06:00):
but also then allow for step down care
for those who did receive services in Fargo.
So I started there in 02/2006
and expanded over in Woodbury. So we had
outpatient presence in the East And West Metro,
and then it was in 02/2009
that we spun off of Prairie Saint John,
started Prairie Care with the ambition of opening
an inpatient hospital.
(06:21):
And the state of Minnesota, there's a moratorium
on hospital beds. So in order to expand
even one bed, you have to get legislative
approval, which we received, and we started by
opening a 20 bed children's hospital in Maple
Grove.
And I'll never forget watching our
license come through on the fax machine. It
was that long ago. Department of Health faxed
us our our new license. We were ready
(06:43):
to open. This was Friday, 02/11/2011,
and it was about 4PM. And that same
evening, we had five admissions.
I thought it was gonna be a week
or two until people even realized we were
open. We were the the first and still
are the only private mental health hospital in
the entire state. At that point, all other
mental health units were embedded in larger centers
(07:03):
or were state hospitals. So we were suddenly
creating, you know, more direct community access to
care.
And we had five admissions in that very
first evening to the point where it, you
know, overwhelmed our team. Not only the excitement
of being able to care for these individuals,
but we were still, you know, figuring out
our processes, the workflows, and so forth.
It was within a matter of weeks that
(07:24):
our 20 bed hospital reached capacity.
We were able to get a variance and
expand to 30 beds. We reached capacity.
We then realized we needed to grow and
expand into a larger building, which is when
we moved here in Brooklyn Park on 50
beds
and similarly filled them up. We expanded 71
and now a hundred and one beds. And
and throughout that storyline of growth as PrairieCare,
(07:47):
we've now reached 10 locations across the Twin
Cities, including Rochester and Mankato. We have a
full continuum of care. It's it's really interesting
in the space,
and then individual
can see their outpatient psychiatrist,
be a part of group therapy,
when or if needed, get higher levels of
care such as partial hospitalization, inpatient hospitalization,
(08:08):
all in the same system. And that's something
that just hadn't been done before. So our
vision has been to transform psychiatric health care.
And and since day one, it simply been
building access and trying to destigmatize
what oftentimes the barrier, the fear of being,
discriminated, destigmatize that and allow people to get
access and thrive within our continuum. Ty, can
(08:28):
you give us a high level overview of
Prairie Care? So Prairie Care has services spread
across 10 locations in Minnesota. Our flagship hospital
is here in Brooklyn Park where we have
a hundred and one beds for children, adolescents,
and young adults.
We have a network of eight partial hospital
programs,
and, partial hospitalization is is similar to inpatient
(08:48):
by way of the treatment program. In other
words, individuals who are receiving hospitalization in partial
hospital get about six to seven hours of
of pretty in-depth psychotherapeutic
programming per day, which includes meeting with psychotherapists,
psychiatrists, nurses.
We have occupational therapists on staff, recreational therapists.
We also offer schooling in all of our
programs for our youngsters.
(09:10):
But then in our hospital, of course, individuals
will will spend the night, and they're with
us oftentimes about seven to ten days. And
it's to make sure we get a good
psychiatric assessment that we're able to stabilize any
conditions, and make sure that we can truly
get a strong treatment plan in in place
that will go beyond hospitalization,
but through our continuum, which I will then
lean on partial hospitalization is often a step
(09:32):
down from the hospital.
We then offer intensive outpatient program, which is
another step down to about three hours of
group programming per day and then into our
clinic services, which includes regular visits with psychotherapists,
with evaluations, with psychologists,
psychiatry, and and even some more innovative things.
For example, we offer a transcranial magnetic stimulation,
(09:53):
something called TMS
at two of our locations.
And And TMS, kind of explain it in
a high level way, is a highly effective
way to manage treatment resistant depression. These are
often individuals who haven't responded,
to multiple antidepressants or traditional psychotherapies.
And it essentially uses magnets, almost like an
MRI magnet, to, I like to say, kind
(10:13):
of stimulate parts of the brain to kind
of get the juices flowing again, if you
will. And I can't say too much more
without getting out over my skis there, but
it's it's highly effective. In fact, we find
that two out of three patients will see
a reduction of symptoms, of nearly fifty percent
in the in the course of the treatment,
and nearly forty percent of those individuals will
go into remission from their depression.
(10:33):
So it's been a really neat service that
we've been offering. To date, we've now had
more than 100,000
individuals receive care throughout our services, which to
me, I always ex I like to expand
that. Those 100,000
individuals often have spouses or siblings. They have
parents and guardians, friends, coworkers,
neighbors. Mhmm. And, you know, very quickly, we're
(10:55):
we're impacting a million people. And that's the
message I like to share with our team
member is the multiplier
of every life we can change
has a a multiplier of of individuals around
them, that benefit from the hard work they're
putting in. You mentioned that you are the
first private mental health hospital.
And are you still the only private mental
health hospital in the state? Correct. We're the
(11:15):
only private hospital in the state right now.
So I think MHA just produced a report.
There are a 26
hospitals in the state of Minnesota and PrairieCare.
Not only are we subspecialty doing something very
very special and different, but we are the
only private hospital. Does that create any challenges
for you? It's a different paradigm. It's a
different model of health care in that, you
know, at the end of the day, we
are contracted with all the major insurance companies.
(11:37):
We take Medicaid. We have a large amount
of the prepaid medical assistance plans.
If individuals have a plan that we currently
aren't contracted for, we'll do single case agreements.
So just like every other hospital in the
state, we work very hard to make sure
that ability to pay is not a limitation.
We play by all those same rules. At
the end of the day, we have very,
very similar margins as the other systems. We
(11:59):
have a lot of our own autonomy, our
ability to raise and manage capital privately as
we see fit. And and that's really been
what's allowed us to, I think, grow and
thrive as we have as a subspecialty hospital
is all of our resources, all of our
attention are focused on providing mental health services.
It seems like there might actually be some
benefits of being the one and only because
(12:20):
I think especially when it comes to mental
health care, there's a lot of challenges with
funding and reimbursement
and stigma and access and all of those
things. And there are a lot of benefits
of being a sort of you're the one.
Yeah. And I like to say it's all
we do. Right? We're not competing amongst other
departments. We we have an intense focus on
mental health care. You know, I often tell
people PrairieCare is a place powered by people.
(12:43):
And I don't mean to be silly with
all the p's in there. It just shakes
up that way. But but truly, 75%
of our expenses of of our investment
is our people. And it's everything from recruitment
training, retention strategies,
obviously, salaries and just making sure that we're
a safe, fun place to work. You know,
imagine yourself on your road to being a
(13:05):
board certified child psychiatrist. You're gonna be in
training for over a decade, you know, starting
from undergraduate all the way through
fellowship. And, you obviously have a passion. You
have a desire to work with a a
special population,
and then you find Prairie Care and you
realize this is all we're designed to do.
Now we do treat all age ranges. We
have a full continuum for for children, adolescents,
(13:26):
and adults. And I like to say, obviously,
the family unit is also cared for in
there. But, yeah, this is all we do.
It's been a a differentiator, and it's allowed
us to to a sharp focus on the
mission, which which truly is our North Star.
So a lot of organizations have a moment
or a series of moments that define who
they've become. And I think this evolution from
Prairie Saint John's to Prairie Care, that seems
like a pretty pivotal moment and sort of
(13:48):
a defining moment. You're taking kids as far
away as Fargo Mhmm. And probably beyond. Are
there
are there any other moment that really defined
Prairie Care to what it is today? Yeah.
I think, as you mentioned, that step of
creating Prairie Care, as an independent Minnesota based
organization, and then very quickly opening our first
twenty bed hospital were those defining moments. Suddenly
(14:10):
we were on the map as a new
hospital, by the way, you know, who who
builds new hospitals? It seems like they're just
around for a hundred years. And we had
the the luxury of building a brand new
state of the art hospital
that really set a new standard for mental
health care as well. And, you know, unfortunately,
Hollywood movies have not done us a favor
in this space when they depict what psychiatric
units and and care looks like. But, truly,
(14:32):
the space that we've created and designed is
part of the treatment. It's a healing space
for our patients and for our team members,
and I think we have set a standard
where we've seen other health systems kinda replicate
some of those fit and finishes and the
focus on safety, but also a very comfortable
environment to receive care. So I think opening
that first twenty bed hospital was was a
huge defining moment for Prairie Care and for
(14:55):
our communities, to be honest. And then I
think moving to our larger campus in Brooklyn
Park in 02/2015
was another step up in us becoming a
core part of Minnesota's mental health system. And
then in 02/2022,
we were acquired by Newport Healthcare, which is
an organization based out of Tennessee,
which provides,
residential care, partial hospital outpatient services
(15:16):
to adolescents and young adults across the country.
So now we are a part of a
system
that has a national footprint,
that has scaled very successfully.
There's also another provider
intensely focused on the mission and providing great
mental health care. What are some of the
roadblocks that you face in in all of
this and have you been able to pivot
(15:37):
to move these, roadblocks forward? You know, Brian,
you hit on the first one. You know,
us being a private organization has just been
different for the states. And I think that
did draw a lot of scrutiny at first
as we were growing. You know, how how
are you doing this? And and can a
hospital of Minnesota
be private? And I think we've demonstrated that,
yes, we can,
and we can still demonstrate a high level
of integrity. We are still driven by our
(15:58):
values,
and provide great care, and and we've demonstrated
that, you know, over and over again.
So we persevered through some of those kind
of cultural, even political roadblocks. And, again, it's
been about our north star, our mission, and
just being determined, our focus on mental health
care.
For the the work we do in general
in mental health care, I think there's kind
of three barriers that prevent
(16:20):
engagement with patients, with our community.
And and the first is actual barriers.
This could be somebody who lacks some transportation.
They lack insurance company, the financial ability to
access services.
The second barrier, as you mentioned, is the
stigma, the fear of being discriminated against. The
thought that if I do receive services, if
I talk about it, if my friends know,
they'll treat me differently, that somehow it's a
(16:42):
character flaw. And, of course, it's not. And
then the third, and I I think this
is an interesting one, and and this is
my opinion,
is, the barrier that people just don't know
that the services exist and that they're effective.
Our tagline is that mental illness is real,
it's common, and it's treatable.
And those second two are particularly important for
(17:02):
people to understand truly how common
mental illnesses can be. In fact, one in
four individuals in their lifetime will experience symptoms
of a diagnosable mental illness. Most commonly, that's
going to be an anxiety disorder, depression, or
a mood disorder.
But once people really understand how common mental
illness and and those symptoms can be, they
can start understanding that it is treatable.
(17:24):
And as you can appreciate,
I like to think of our mental health
on like this four dimensional spectrum of illness
and wellness and just like our physical health,
we're never perfectly healthy. We're always kind of
moving about.
The depth and breadth of mental health is
truly haunting and very complex.
But we can understand that every one of
(17:45):
us will feel depressed at one point. And
if those symptoms become intense, if they persist,
we need to know that talking to somebody,
receiving cognitive behavioral therapy, or, talk to primary
care about antidepressants
will make us feel better. In fact, eighty
percent of individuals over the course of a
few months as scored by the PHQ nine
or the GAD seven depression or anxiety scales,
(18:06):
will often feel better after they engage in
evidence based treatment. And if people can understand
that it's common and you can feel better,
I think more people will engage proactively with
mental health care. A barrier you didn't mention,
which I hear often, is staffing. And you
mentioned with your alliteration of the p's, Prairie
care is a place powered by people.
The people that you mentioned, that that is
(18:27):
key. Right? Yes. Is finding the staff, the
qualified
staff a challenge? Is it a barrier? Or
have you found the magical solution that it's
not a barrier for you? It's not a
challenge for you? Oh, boy. Yes. It's a
barrier. It's difficult finding
the right staff, the qualified staff, and making
sure that we can create an environment where
they can thrive,
(18:48):
and not burn out. There's not a lot
of folks entering the field. And when the
good ones do, we need to make sure,
again, that we can treat them well and
keep them connected with our mission
so they can thrive. It's hard work. And
I I like to remind all of our
teams from day one and throughout their tenure
here at PrairieCare that you're cut from a
different cloth.
Many of us are are here for a
(19:08):
reason. We're very passionate. We have a lot
of empathy. We want to see people get
better, and it takes a lot of hard
work and investment
to sometimes get those small rewards, those twinkles
of of inspiration, whether it's a thank you
card or the high five from the kid
who for the last six weeks have been
giving you the stink eye and calling you
dirty names, but knowing that you've truly made
a profound impact in their life. It it
(19:29):
takes a lot of resiliency
and determination.
So
recruiting,
retaining, and nourishing the workforce
is really hard, and we need to make
sure that all of our leaders understand that
if it's not for our people,
maintaining that resiliency and being engaged, we don't
have a program. That's what we are. What
do you do really well? What does PrairieCare
(19:51):
do really well? And what are you maybe
doing differently? I think we keep our eyes
open and we listen really well. We understand
the landscape is always changing and it needs
to change. Again, I mentioned before, we're inspired
by our vision to transform psychiatric health care.
And I often tell people that's the vision
because it has to be transformed. We have
to do something different and better. For example,
mental health care gets about 4% of all
(20:13):
NIH funding and research.
Some have attributed nearly 50% of all of
health care costs, to be rooted back to
mental health or or behavioral health of some
sort, one's ability to engage within the health
system. So we need to invest more in
research. We need to understand that we have
a long ways to go to not only
catch up to the rest of health care,
but really be able to provide the care
(20:34):
that our communities truly need. So we listen
for those opportunities, and I think we're humble.
We try to be vulnerable at times and
see what different things we can do. And
in the spirit of transformation, there's a few
things we've done that I think have been
a differentiator
and has has really been inspiring to our
team internally.
Number one is many years ago, we started
something called the psychiatric assistance line, and this
(20:55):
is a a grant funded program through the
Department of Human Human Services where any health
care provider in the state of Minnesota, Monday
through Friday, can pick up the phone, reach
out to us, or they can do this
online, and immediately get a board certified psychiatrist
on the other end of the phone to
consult on a case. We do direct consultations
in real time. We do education to primary
care, and we also help with triage. This
(21:17):
is a really simple thing, but it's allowed
us to now help thousands of individuals
get care in real time in those primary
care settings,
and ultimately help empower and encourage those primary
care providers to do more as well, give
them the confidence they need to treat sometimes
more complex cases
in their offices. This doesn't happen within our
four walls. This isn't necessarily
(21:38):
creating more patients or business for us, but
it's the right thing to do, and it's
been energizing for our team. The other thing
that we've been a part of that's been
really fun is a couple years ago, along
with a grassroots movement in the community,
we created something called the mental health collaboration
hub. And we have all heard in recent
years about this boarding crisis. Kids and adults
(22:00):
as well who are in behavioral health or
psychiatric crisis end up going to hospitals, end
up going to EDs,
sometimes end up going to get county services,
and they end up boarding in these, what
I call, inappropriate care settings. While they might
be safe in a hospital,
they're probably not going to get their immediate
psychiatric needs met, the stabilization they need, and
(22:21):
certainly not the ongoing healing. And because there's
nowhere else to go, they get stuck and
they board for days, even weeks at a
time. With mental health collaboration hub, when these
cases present,
those hospitals, those care settings can upload de
identified information into a website,
and it notifies all of the appropriate care
providers across the state that there is a
(22:42):
case that could use your help. Now the
other alternative is that it means
the busy ED staff, the nurses, the the
people in the hospitals and counties
are otherwise picking up the phone, calling, trying
to reach out to care providers to figure
out who takes the right insurance. Do you
specialize in in this clinical treatment modality?
By the way, do you treat 12 year
(23:02):
olds or only adults?
The hub does all the work. And beyond
the fact that we now in the last
two years have been able to help connect
over 400 kids who've been boarding to treatment,
we've built a community, and a lot of
the people participate in the hub and the
weekly calls that we have for the networking.
And to watch the shift happen where these
boarding settings
(23:24):
have learned more about not only the mental
health providers, but the treatment modalities and the
evidence based care pathways,
not only to watch that appreciation
increase, but also the compassion that those providers
have for the hospitals and the work that
they're doing has really been kind of enlightening
for us all and really energizing. And and
that's the kind of thing that PrairieCare, I
(23:44):
think, thrives on outside of our four walls.
The work and the impact that we can
have in the community
through these projects is is really fun. When
I first heard of the mental health collaboration,
I have I just saw that every community
everywhere needs this.
It's only in Minnesota. Correct? Correct. Yep. This
is something that you built just in Minnesota,
and you're not aware of this happening anywhere
(24:06):
else in the country in any other states.
Certainly not in the way this just kinda
spurred through this true kinda grassroots movement of
passionate providers coming together. For sure. And through
my work as an architect, there's a lot
of movement even across state line. When care
isn't provided in one state, some patients might
move to another state for residential treatment and
finding the appropriate level of care in the
appropriate setting. I imagine that there's an opportunity
(24:27):
or a need for this to expand beyond
the walls of Minnesota. Right?
Absolutely. Is there a vision to do that
at all at this point? The tool itself,
what we've created, the concept
is agnostic to the region, even the condition
of the care setting. Okay. There's nothing that
has or will prevent us from faking it
much bigger other than just our own internal
bandwidth the way the way it is today.
(24:49):
I've had emergency medicine physicians in other states.
In fact, Washington recently, who I connected with,
talked about doing this for other types of
conditions, other types of emergencies.
To be honest, part of the the spark
for this idea came from the way our
health care communities responded during COVID when we
were desperately seeking capacity, ICU beds, and so
forth. It wasn't acceptable just to send ambulances
(25:10):
to hospitals to figure out when they arrived
if they had capacity.
We had to do something smarter. It's too
bad that it took that crisis and having
to endure this ongoing boarding crisis to get
us to where we're at today, but it's
truly been transformational.
Any advice you'd have for another community or
another state to start something like this? How
did you make it happen? It's an important
(25:30):
resource that so many kids and adults would
benefit from. I think the key is in
the name collaboration,
and that takes
humility.
There's a great line.
I thought I knew a lot until I
learned a little.
And I think in health care, we have
to understand there's a lot more we don't
know. And, again, whether that's about health care
operations or simply
(25:51):
science and the practice of medicine or just
simply the way we need to collaborate throughout
communities, As I've shared with, stakeholders in other
states about both the psychiatric assistance line and
the mental health collaboration hub, it is interesting
to me that the surprise I hear about
the psychiatric assistance line, wait a minute. So
primary care will pick up the phone and
and call you? They have that humility to
(26:12):
say, hey. I'm not sure what to do
here. Can you help? And similarly with mental
health collaboration hub that every week, we have
thirty, forty, 50 people come together to talk
about a handful of cases to help get
these kids out of those settings.
And that's that's helped kinda reinforce with me
truly, I I think, how special our communities
and specifically health care communities are here in
Minnesota. I wanted to ask a little bit
(26:33):
more about how you've leaned on other partnerships
to build out and grow your services in
your organization. I think the mental health collaboration
hub is certainly one of those connecting to
primary care is one. Mhmm. Are there any
other partnerships that you you really lean on
or leverage to help with growing your behavioral
health services?
Over the years, I think we've counted well
over 30 different partnerships we've had in the
(26:54):
communities. And and again, it's ranging from a
grant funded projects like PAL and the the
mental health collaboration hub, all the way to
formal service agreements where we're providing psychiatric services
in in local school districts, in local primary
care clinics, and even a partnership with Children's
Minnesota to help them launch, back in 2,022.
(27:14):
And I personally have always felt that when
we can find
ways to further
practice of medicine, mental health care, and and
psychiatry, where, again, we know there's a shortage
and we know there's barriers, that we need
to share that with others. And sometimes it's
simply operational procedures. It can be safety measures.
It can be the way we're designing spaces,
(27:35):
but ultimately down to, you know, multidisciplinary
treatment teams interacting in a way that truly
gets to the root of
somebody's condition and that evidence based care pathway.
We love sharing those things. And the more
we share, the more we trust, the more
we support others, the more we see that
in return.
And as we mentioned earlier, initially having seen
(27:55):
some of that scrutiny as the only private
hospital,
that openness and that willingness to collaborate and
help others, I think, has come back to
us in return with the gratitude
and graces we've we've seen in others. I
really love that. It's about sharing and trust,
transparency,
collaboration.
It takes a village.
It takes the whole community.
(28:15):
While I believe that we provide extraordinary care
at Prairie and we are a premier provider,
we don't feel like we need to compete.
We don't feel like we need to capture
market share or outperform others. We want to
be the tide that lifts all ships. Is
there anything else you wanna share? The takeaway
I'd like people to have is what we
like to share. Mental illness is real, it's
(28:36):
common, and it's treatable.
And when people can understand that, when they
can accept that this is a part of
life, and you may not be depressed today,
you may not feel that anxiety today, but
you you might in the future. A loved
one might. With the data being that, you
know, one in four people experience these symptoms,
you or somebody you know quite well will.
And for us to still be open and
talk about those things and have trust that
(28:57):
we can get better is is really important.
That engagement
with health care in a preventative proactive way
is critical. And just know that there's a
lot of compassionate people out there, who can
help ourselves and our our loved ones. Todd,
thank you. This This has been great. I
really appreciate all of your insight,
and I know our listeners that will really
value out listening to this. Thanks, Brian. I
appreciate the opportunity.
(29:20):
For more information on our listen mental health
matters series,
please visit hdrinc.com/listen.
There, you'll find more on HDR's approach to
behavioral and mental health design, meet our team,
and see samples of our work.
If you like what you heard, be sure
to rate us or leave a comment on
on Apple Podcasts,
(29:40):
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