The Mat-Su Health Foundation recently released a health care report that the foundation's executive director says underscores the Matanuska-Susitna Borough's lack of adequate behavioral health services.
As a result of the deficiency, many borough residents experiencing behavioral health problems, including mental illness or substance abuse, found themselves admitted to the emergency department at the Mat-Su Regional Medical Center. There care can be more expensive and often less effective than care from a behavioral health professional, according to the report released last week.
"What the data clearly shows is the No. 1 provider of behavioral health services in Mat-Su is our emergency department, which does not specialize in behavioral health services," said Elizabeth Ripley, the foundation's executive director.
In 2013, the hospital's emergency department saw 2,391 patients with behavioral health diagnoses. These patients had 6,053 visits with charges totaling $23 million. The top five diagnoses included alcohol-related disorders, attempts or ideas of suicide, anxiety disorders, substance-related disorders and mood disorders, according to the report.
"A lot of money is being invested in meeting people's needs in the emergency department, but their needs are not actually being met. A lot of people are going back over and over," said Melissa Kemberling, director of programs at the Mat-Su Health Foundation.
The report characterized 305 behavioral health patients as "high utilizers" who, within a year, had collectively visited the emergency department 2,492 times. Individually, their charges averaged $14,235 a year.
The Mat-Su Health Foundation, a nonprofit arm of the hospital, released the report as part of an ongoing research project, prompted by a 2013 needs assessment where residents ranked mental and emotional health and substance abuse as the borough's highest-priority health concerns.
Within the year, the foundation plans to release two additional reports analyzing aspects of the borough's behavioral health care. This one focused on its crisis response system. Its purpose, Ripley said, is to "look at how can we change or rework the system to better serve the people."
"We're in a position to tell the story with this data in a different way to hopefully command change," she said.
The need for behavioral health services is there, she said. From 2007 to 2009, the borough had a suicide rate twice as high as the U.S. rate. In 2013, 20 percent of 1,598 middle school students surveyed in the borough said "they had seriously considered suicide in the last year." Alcohol and substance abuse was suspected in almost half of all borough homicides and suicides between 2003 and 2011, the report said.
The report made 13 recommendations that included a crisis stabilization and respite center with 12 to 16 treatments beds, expanding Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, case management for those who frequented the emergency department and developing a behavioral health care network of community-based providers.
The full report is available at healthymatsu.org.