With rapidly growing demand for mental and behavioral health services since the pandemic started, the State of Colorado swiftly responded with the passing of HB21-1258. This Rapid Mental Health Response for Colorado Youth facilitates access to mental health services, including substance use disorder services, for youth to respond to identified mental health needs, including those needs that may have resulted from the COVID-19 pandemic. The program reimburses providers for up to 3 mental health sessions with a youth.
To support this complex initiative, the State of Colorado Office of Behavioral Health (OBH) needed to enable every youth in the state access to a mental health screening and three follow-on sessions with a clinical provider. OBH enlisted in TeleTeachers to develop the technology needed to deliver the screening, as well as provide clinical, licensed mental health and substance use disorder providers to deliver telehealth services.
TeleTeachers leveraged components of its platform, Mira, to create a custom technology solution focused on the needs of Colorado’s youth. The solution, branded I Matter, guides youth through an initial mental health screening and matches them with the provider that best meets their needs.
TeleTeachers was able to deliver the much-needed platform functionality of youth and provider onboarding, provider matching, telehealth hosting, session management and billing as well as creation of care navigation workflows for continuity of support after the initial sessions.
By letting TeleTeachers lead on the tech development, the State of Colorado and Signal Behavioral Health Network were able to have all resources focused on its core ability of supporting providers and engaging community-based resources to deliver quality behavioral health services.
TeleTeachers helped the State of Colorado set up and optimize youth and provider onboarding in all 64 counties. TeleTeachers has also helped Signal maximize operational bandwidth by providing the team with integrated reporting on utilization, automated scheduling and rescheduling of sessions, and guidance on best practices in telehealth platform management.
The I Matter program has a statewide public awareness and outreach campaign that includes digital ads on social platforms, such as TikTok and Snapchat, and on-the-ground outreach to schools and youth organizations. Both the awareness campaign and the IMatterColorado.org website were informed by youth feedback.