Hi, everyone. This is Erica Spicer Mason with the Becker's Healthcare Podcast Series. Thank you so much for tuning in today. I'm thrilled to be joined by a guest, Vasar Tasimi, the senior vice president of provider success at Lucid. Bazar, without further ado, we'd like to welcome you to the podcast. Really appreciate you making time for Becker's today. Thank you, Erica, and thank you, Becker's. I'm glad to be here. We're really glad to have you. I know we'll be diving into the topic of behavioral health today, which is such an important one. But before we do, would you like to say just a little bit more about yourself, your background, maybe a little bit more about Lucid as well? Sure. So I'm like you said, Vissar Tasimi. I'm the senior vice president of provider success at Lucit. I've been with the company for about two and a half years. Lucit is a behavioral health services organization that serves over 15,000,000 members across the country in a variety of of different health plans and direct to employers as well through our EAP business. The provider success organization is an organization that we renamed, which in other companies are typically called network operations or the like. But we took an interesting approach here to name this provider success because we believe that in order for a behavioral health business and many other payer services businesses to be successful, we need our providers to be successful. And so our mission as as a department is to empower providers to treat their patients and do what they do best and provide them support and services that they need. So, so that's what we do here at Lucid from a behavioral health perspective and and in particular, the provider success team. Great. Thank you so much for the overview, Vasar. It it's great to hear how your organization is, as you put it, empowering providers. I think that's so important in this in this current landscape where in behavioral health, we're seeing a really sharp rise in demand for services and at the same time, a critical provider shortage. So in that environment, I'd love to know from your perspective, what communication challenges and barriers are you seeing health plans deal with here, especially when it comes to engaging their providers? And why is addressing that so important? Absolutely. You know, the the behavioral health provider landscape is much different than the, for example, primary care landscape where so much of the primary care market is connected to large facility systems and health systems that provides those primary care offices a lot of administrative support and, and back end functions to help them run their business. In the behavioral health landscape, there's still certainly a lot of fragmentation where there are solar practitioners and small partnerships and certainly large organizations as well. But, given the the access challenges out in the marketplace and the the real need for for behavioral health services, it's really important to engage the whole ecosystem of behavioral health providers and try to empower them as best we can to be available for for members and and take on patients and and treat them well. And so the, you know, the barriers there has a lot to do with technology, and processes. You know, providers are are not just in the business of being a provider. They are when they are participating with, managed care plans, dealing with the administrative burden of of doing so. And so think about claim submissions and updating their their information and profiles and everything that they need to do to appear, in a provider directory accurately and the like. And so what's really important to the behavioral health network is is offering them solutions and support, whether they are a a solo practitioner just starting off their business or part of a large organization, again, empowering them to to spend their time and resources on treating members and and trying to minimize the administrative burden on their practices. And, you know, that is, that is a challenge in that there's a lot of work that health plans are are pulled in different directions with their primary care network, their network of specialists, their inpatient networks. You know, the behavioral health networks are are certainly as important, but but are in a sea of of work that health plans are working on. And so, again, from a from a Lucid perspective, you know, we specialize only in behavioral health, and, this is an important aspect to make sure that we are trying to support these providers as best we can and and embrace them and their technology and processes and help bridge those gaps to, to make sure the providers are focusing on on doing what they do best, which is treating their patients. Yeah. I really appreciate how you described this behavioral health landscape as fragmented, so to speak. And it sounds like there's a lot of opportunities to kind of connect the dots, make providers more visible, to their networks. And yeah. So I really appreciate that overview. And, Vasari, you mentioned primary care toward the beginning of your response, and I wanted to to dive into primary care just a little bit here. I know that, you know, some of those initial behavioral health screenings, like depression screenings, for example, those can take place in a primary care setting. So can you share with our audience how primary care plays a role in that communication and information exchange surrounding behavioral health? Maybe you could walk us through an example. It's a critical channel. You think about a patient's journey when they may think that they need behavioral health services for the first time in their life. They may not know what the difference between a therapist and a psychologist and a psychiatrist is, yet there's a pretty good chance that they have a relationship with a primary care provider that they've had for potentially a long time and and have the trust of that PCP to to know where to go when they have a health issue. And so, the primary care channel is is critical in that they are a a catcher's mitt of patients who have behavioral health needs. And so providing resources for the primary care channel in supporting them to to help them with patients that they have, their patients who have behavioral health care needs and letting them know where to go and what resources are available to them is is absolutely critical. And so one of the examples around this, around information sharing, just just on the front end of referrals, and then we'll get to the back end around what actually happened. We're working with a a primary care practice in Florida that, is is high volume, has a lot of patients they see, and and certainly a lot of their patients have behavioral health care needs. And in the, in the prior scenario, it's it's really difficult for these primary care physicians to to try to to find somewhere to go with with those patients. And so what we have done is we connected with that primary care practice, and we integrated with their EMR. And so when they see a patient that has a behavioral health need, that PCP knows what to do. They go into their EMR. They drop down their their referral specialty field. And when they get to behavioral health, we're we're coded in their system, Lucid, as the first option. And so when they click that button, they can tell their patient, okay, understand your needs. We're gonna get you a referral. Lucid is gonna be the organization that's gonna call you and help you get the care that you need. And so that triggers a an outreach from the Lucid team to get in touch with that patient and screen them and find out what their care needs are, whether they actually do need a therapist or a psychiatrist or or another type of behavioral health care need and get them scheduled into an appointment. And so that that primary care physician knows their patient is being taken care of, going to a a visit a practitioner that is clinically appropriate from the Haver Health standpoint and know that that that patient is going to get seen in a reasonable amount of time. On the back end of this, it's also really important around information exchange that that PCP also captures the information after that initial appointment and ongoing, you know, captures the information after that initial appointment and ongoing appointments happen to know that, yes, my patient did go to to so and so therapist or psychiatrist and here's their treatment plan. And and Lucid is in the middle of that, those transactions to to connect to the PCP world and let them know, yes, your patients are being taken care of and here's where they're going. So, you know, we do have a lot of of members and patients who who can navigate the system and and land themselves in favor of health care services directly, but there's certainly a very large role for the primary care channel to play around getting their patients who have behavioral health needs and a solution for them as opposed to a, you know, the traditional method of, you know, here may be a list of of providers that we may know in the community by, you know, by a discharge planner or someone in the office versus a full suite solution that that someone like Lucid can offer. Fascinating. Thanks so much, Vassar. Sounds like just that simple practice of integrating this tool within the EHR, it's really helpful for both the provider and the patient, kind of streamlines that, linkage to care. So appreciate you sharing a little more detail about that. And I think that actually serves my next question serves up my next question, which which is that I wanted to know about any other key strategies or resources that you'd recommend to health plans in order to better engage behavioral health providers and improve care, kind of as we talked about. I know those that integrated e r EHR feature is one thing, but any other resources or strategies you wanted to kind of elaborate on or even just a best next step leaders can take to drive progress? Yeah. I think the the way of the world that we can connect these two systems is through, integrated programs between the the PCP or medical programs that health plans are engaging with their own network and their behavioral health programs and making sure that these are not two separate programs, that they are working together. And so as I mentioned a little bit before in the last example about the primary care and how we help navigate members, into behavioral health appointments, that that is our our navigate and connect solution where we are Lucid is taking the guesswork out of the patient and screening them and connecting to networks of providers who are connected into our technology and providing their real time appointment availability to to offer up that that channel for the patients. But again, the the key there is that that is not stand alone, that that is connected to the the medical networks and the medical programs and, you know, potentially, in some cases, the care management programs that exist in, in the health plans medical world. And so making sure that these members that have higher care needs are co managed by both their medical programs and their behavioral health programs and that there's connectivity there. Because these, again, these are not exclusive in terms of a patient's care needs. They may be diagnosed with a, with an issue with a diagnosis that that comes with a behavioral health burden on that patient, a new cancer diagnosis. You think about someone's behavioral health care needs when they just find out about a diagnosis like that. And so making sure, you know, again, from the traditional standpoint that those patients are seeing their oncologists and have a care plan forward, but they also need to be assessed for behavioral health care needs to make sure that they're in a good place from a well-being standpoint. Mhmm. Yeah. Connectivity really seems to be the through line here, in regards to ensuring patients have access to behavioral health services in the first place, that they are linked to them, and that, those services kinda fit into a a more holistic care plan. So, Vasari, this has been such an educational conversation. Really appreciate everything you've shared. Is there anything that we didn't touch on or any final thoughts that you wanted our audience to know? Scott, I would just say broadly speaking, you know, the the behavioral health community out there of providers are are wonderful individuals that understand that this is about the holistic care of of members and that they are connected to the world and not existing just in the vacuum of of Vabra healthcare needs. So I'm I'm so privileged to work with Vabra healthcare providers in the markets that that we serve and the members that we serve and just love seeing the the innovation that is coming out of these channels in terms of moving forward, the connectivity, the integrations between technology systems and between medical and facility systems and behavioral health care. It's certainly wonderful to see that that these two worlds are coming together, and I think that's just gonna be the the best possible outcome in treating patients. So it's it's a wonderful time to be in behavioral health care, and I and I love seeing where things are going. Visart, thank you so much again for your time, for sharing your passion in this field and for ending your work. Appreciate you being on the podcast today. Thank you again. Thanks for being here. I really appreciate it, Erica. And we'd also like to thank Lucid for sponsoring today's episode. Listeners, please be sure to tune into more podcasts from Becker's by visiting our podcast page at beckershospitalreview.com.