Sutter Partners With Concert Health on Collaborative Care Program
Beginning in January, California-based Sutter will coordinate with Concert Health to co-manage treatment for patients who experience a broad range of behavioral health disorders. The service will initially be available to patients in four Northern California cities.
Sutter patients who report a behavioral health concern to their primary care provider will be connected with Concert Health via phone or video within 24 to 48 hours to monitor symptoms and medications and provide evidence-based counseling interventions. Concert Health’s psychiatric providers will review patient cases regularly, provide feedback and guidance to the behavioral health team, and make specific treatment recommendations to the Sutter primary care providers.
To start, San Diego-based Concert Health will receive patient referrals from Sutter primary care practices located in Lakeport, Crescent City, Palo Alto, and Dublin. The collaboration between Sutter and Concert Health is particularly important in rural Lakeport and Crescent City, where it is difficult to recruit and retain mental health providers, leaving patients with less access to care.
Concert already works with health systems such as AdventHealth, Mass General Brigham, Trinity Health, and CommonSpirit.
“Supporting improved access to mental health services is one of our top priorities here at Sutter,” said Tam Nguyen, Ph.D., clinical psychologist and behavioral health service line executive at Sutter Health, in a statement. “We appreciate the opportunity to work alongside like-minded organizations to help increase mental health treatment capacity and offer people an option that is easy to access. Making these services a routine part of medical care has been shown to improve both outcomes and the patient experience, so we’re pleased to make this available through primary care.”
Healthcare Innovation interviewed Spencer Hutchins, M.B.A., co-founder and CEO of Concert Health, in June 2024 about the company’s new partnership with Pennsylvania-based WellSpan Health. We asked him to describe the company’s origin story, and this is what he said:
Hutchins: I happened to read the original randomized control study for the care model called the Impact trial in the summer of 2016 and I thought that the idea that you're going to have a behavioral health clinician and a psychiatrist support primary care makes sense in this measurement-based approach. Not only did it make sense, it had pretty bulletproof research, far better than most health services interventions.
And I was just kind of mystified why it hadn't scaled. I realized that there were two reasons. One was that the money didn't work. There wasn't a coherent reimbursement mechanism. The studies had all been grant-funded, and people were trying to do versions of it. The doctors could get paid to work separately, but they couldn't get paid to work together. The second reason was that it's kind of complicated to put this together, put the culture, protocol, and technology enablement together. That fall, I got word that Medicare was going to provisionally create a reimbursement scheme for it.
Although I thought that technology is an important part of it, I felt like, frankly, someone needed to build the whole stack — including the medical group itself to employ amazing behavioral health clinicians and psychiatrists who could offer it as an easy button to the primary care teams out there. I thought if someone made this possible, the primary care doctors and their medical groups would be really excited about that kind of model. And so that started us. We had to wait for about a year for the regulations to clarify, and then we launched care starting in suburban Phoenix in 2018.
