As published in Toledo Business Journal - September 1, 2019
Harbor Behavioral Health located in Toledo
As behavioral health issues grow as a concern in the United States and in the region, Harbor Behavioral Health – a mental health provider in northwest Ohio with locations in Lucas, Wood, and Defiance Counties – is continuing to address the need for mental health services here with its employee assistance program and range of services.
To help address the opioid crisis, socioeconomic issues, and generational issues – and to help the area workforce – Harbor offers an employee assistance program, which, according to John Sheehan, chief executive officer of Harbor, helps employees and the businesses that use it. He noted that the program covers approximately 190,000 lives in the greater Toledo area.
“We provide a very specific service to companies that have employees that are going through issues related to their home life, related to their finances, or really related to things that just come up in life that don’t really have anything to do with their daily work. But if they don’t have anyone to talk to, it will impact their daily work. And so we do a lot to promote wellness within these corporations,” said Sheehan. “We can do things like look at their drug spend in their healthcare plan and start to look at the health of the population just by that. We’ve also started to add other services related to some of the issues that have come up in the ‘Me Too’ movement where sexual harassment is not something that is usually handled well in some of these businesses. And so we started to look at other services that might help us enhance the services we can offer to businesses. And so it’s a very strong part of what we do at Harbor. Not necessarily behavioral health services, but more of a coaching service and a place for employees to go if they just need to talk to someone. So that’s been a very effective tool for us in the community.”
Sheehan explained that having a healthy workforce translates to having a healthy business as well.
“The health of the workforce is directly related to the cost of making a product or providing a service. Your job as a business leader – and it doesn’t change whether you’re in healthcare or you’re in any other industry – is finding and keeping customers. The way you find and keep customers is through customer service, and your employees are your first point of contact with your customers. If your employees are not happy or are struggling with some type of a mental illness or substance abuse issue or just generally having some struggles in life that they need some help with, that can really impact your front door, productivity, and could really impact how your products and services are sold or presented,” said Sheehan. “So those are things you want to pay attention to. You always want your workforce as healthy and as happy as you can possibly make them while offsetting what it costs to do that. So we provide what we think is a very valuable service at the right price point that helps businesses keep their employees at their maximum wellness and that helps them find and keep customers.”
Sheehan went on to explain that mental health issues have also been recognized, discussed, and treated more seriously in the recent past and there is a new way of describing and treating behavioral health issues, especially within northwest Ohio.
“The important thing to understand is that there is really a new way of describing behavioral health. For many years we were in two silos – mental health and substance abuse services. We understand now that those disorders and that those subgroups of disorders are related and and occur together so often – we think it’s higher than 95% of the patients we see have something going on in one of the domains – so it’s co-occurring. What we look for now – we call it the ‘no wrong door approach’ – is someone who is seeking services probably has a mental health and a substance abuse disorder. We also are now looking a lot more closely for trauma that’s occurred in someone’s background before we begin treatment, and we call that trauma informed care,” said Sheehan.
“So given that background and looking at it through those lenses, the need for services is very great because in northwest Ohio, we find a perfect storm of the opiate crisis, socioeconomic issues related to people finding good work and good jobs, and generational issue of previous disorders or issues that weren’t addressed and are a family disease. So these kinds of issues pop up in northwest Ohio and is really considered ground zero to many because of our location and the range of issues that occur,” said Sheehan.
In addition to the employee assistance program, Harbor offers family medicine, vocational programs for those with barriers to employment, developmental pediatrics, school-based achievement programs, and wellness education, among others. According to Harbor, it aims to improve the health and well being of individuals and families by providing the highest quality compassionate care possible.
“Behavioral health disorders can be and are treated much differently now than they were for most of my career. Previously, if you had a heart condition, you got everything you needed to recover from that heart condition. But if you had a behavioral health condition, you got five visits, 30 days of inpatient, and a very limited amount of follow-up care and that was it. Then came the Affordable Care Act, which created something called the essential health benefits, which said these are the things that you cannot treat any differently than you would treat any other disorder, and one of those was behavioral health. So we immediately went from being not on the radar as a chronic disease and as a cost to the system to very important and being the number one cost in the system,” said Sheehan. “So we jump hearts, diabetes – we jumped every other chronic disease category and I think have outpaced them by more than 30% to this day. So now, because we’re part of the healthcare risk pool, I don’t think there’s a way to move us out again because that cost is there. So anyone with any co-occurring medical condition should be considered to have a behavioral health disorder. We didn’t do that 10 years ago and that’s a huge change.”