A Conversation With … Mat Gass

Size and scope allows me as a clinician and as a leader to deploy resources that we wouldn’t have if we were a small center. That’s really the heart of this for me.”

The merger between Brightli/Burrell Behavioral Health and Centerstone, finalized in November, creates a lot of opportunities for you, a lot of change too, becoming the largest nonprofit behavioral health provider in the country. What are some of the most impactful changes that will come from an operational level and a patient level?
It’s very easy to talk about and quantify size, being the largest behavioral health network in the nation, or serving 250,000 consumers or the $1.1 billion in top-line behavioral health revenue. But that only matters if we’re providing really good care. The relationship between a provider and the person receiving care is much more important to me than the size and scope. Size and scope allows me as a clinician and as a leader to deploy resources that we wouldn’t have if we were a small center. That’s really the heart of this for me.

The benefit, from my perspective, has been felt so quickly because of having a peer group. With this merger now, whether it’s myself as a CEO in a state, I’ve got a group of those individuals that I can work with every single day as it relates to our patients. Today, through Centerstone, we have access to a 120-person research institute that’s working every day to advance evidence-based practices. Additionally, we’ve got the ability to use that institute for project management or quality initiatives. All of this allows us to provide the best possible care to clients.

Tell me about your interest in this field and what continues your personal motivation to stay.
I’ve been in the behavioral health field for 25 years now, 15 of that with Burrell. Like so many others, I’ve witnessed the impact of untreated mental health and substance use disorders within my extended family. I don’t know why this stuck with me, but when I was about 7 or 8 years old, my father worked on a construction project at Cox North Hospital. Several days he came home and would share about a homeless woman who “talked” to herself. I saw my father troubled about her vulnerability. He genuinely worried about her ... yet he didn’t know how to help her. Although I never found out what happened to that woman, her experience and my father’s stories never left me. One of the most meaningful moments in my career at Burrell was returning to Springfield in 2014 to lead the Transitions program, which included the homeless outreach team at Bill’s Place. Even though we had to adapt our homeless services program following The Kitchen’s sale of that property, I remain incredibly proud of the work we did. Contributing to a cause that deeply resonated with my father’s concern for others has been so meaningful.

What are some of the best practices that you’re researching now that you think we might see coming online to better support patients?
The integration of evidence-based practices, behavioral health and informatics, the ability to really drill down to what’s important to a client. To learn whether one session or 100 sessions is most effective for an individual, and then to be able to support clinicians with educational opportunities are all things that we’re looking forward for with the institute.

Are you already utilizing technology to review this data? Or do you see that as something you might invest in?
Technology is something that we’re talking about all the time, but right now the behavioral health electronic health records are not as advanced as what you would see in traditional health care. These are the kinds of initiatives through the Centerstone merger that we can start to look at. In our organization, we have a number of electronic health records, so over time, over a period of years, we would like to have a uniform client experience.

Access is something you hear a lot in the behavioral health space, that it’s hard to get into a provider. I would think some of our more rural communities you’d see that even more. How does this merger help improve access?
Centerstone is a name that has built trust for 40-plus years, much like the Burrell name has in the past. So providers want to work in places that are exciting, that are focused on provider culture, that are on the cutting edge, that allows us to recruit more people into the system. If I’m a client in a rural area, there may only be one or two providers in that particular community. I may not want to work with them because they may be somebody that I see at the grocery store or at a sporting event, or they may be someone who needs a particular specialty. And through this partnership, they can access a clinician who has that specialty, whether they’re that clinician is in St. Louis or Kansas City or Springfield. When we force people to make choices about whether or not they get care due to distance or due to limited behavioral health resources, that community suffers. And so for us, being large, being able to provide telehealth services at a clinic, but also in someone’s living room, allows people to get the care that they need.

When a behavioral crisis center model was first announced in Springfield, the thought was, could this divert some folks from going into the ER for care. What have you seen from the outcomes of that in terms of getting people to the place that they need to go for help?
The goal of a community mental health center is to make sure that individuals in the community, wherever they need care, have the opportunity to access a person with specialization, and behavioral health crisis centers fill that need. Emergency rooms have always been able to serve an individual in a crisis, but they’re really geared towards stabilization. And a behavioral health crisis center provide stabilization as well, but the key differentiator is being able to provide that follow-up care for the individual regardless of what that self-identified crisis is and then be able to work alongside that individual until they make that connection. There’s a robust network of crisis centers across the state. We’re very excited for the behavioral crisis center that recently opened in Sedalia. The Springfield Behavioral Crisis Center has been a leader, and that helps shape what behavioral crisis centers look like across the state of Missouri. And then we’ve been operating a temporary behavioral health crisis center in Columbia on a smaller footprint and scale for almost five years now. Within the next year, we’ll be opening a new behavioral crisis center in Columbia, much more typical to what the one here in Springfield looks like.

Do you anticipate investing in more of those crisis centers or are there other types of facilities that you think would be the best type of investment?
We see continued growth in 988. We see continued growth in behavioral crisis centers. We don't spend as much time talking about mobile crisis or co-responders. This is really about: How do we conveniently get a person to the care that they need, even if they don't know that mental health services are available to them. There's a number of different models of co-response. It could be riding alongside law enforcement the way that we do here in Springfield, or in some communities it might be co-response with a paramedic. Each community has their own beliefs in where that mental health touch should be when an individual is identified as having a need.