Mebs Counseling Increases 100+ Encounters In One Week Using Telehealth
About Mebs Counseling
Mebs Counseling began delivering behavioral health services almost twenty years ago, providing children, families, adults and couples with evidence-based behavioral health and substance abuse wrap-around services in the Northern Kentucky area. The clinic treats a vulnerable population; a large portion of their client base falls under the poverty line and face difficult socioeconomic barriers to access and care.
Children and adults receive counseling and community-based services, including psychotherapy, assessments and evaluations, and case management. Mebs Counseling’s more than 50 providers comprise professionally licensed clinicians, targeted case management, and community living support workers that deliver care across settings and facilities, including schools and other institutions.
Journey To Telehealth
The facility began using the Azalea Health Electronic Health Record (EHR) software in 2014 to manage their patient population, 99 percent of which qualify for Medicaid. In early March of 2020, Jill Veach, Program Administrator for Mebs Counseling started to look at Azalea Health’s telehealth solution as an additional tool to help facilitate patient care.
Mebs Counseling is unique in that most of their services and support are provided outside of the clinic. They work across schools, institutions, and off-site centers, often through a team approach that engages multiple caregivers for a single patient. While many of these sessions are conducted in person, Mebs Counseling needed a way to help ease connections between patients and caregivers through a remote care option like Azalea Health’s telehealth.
“A few weeks after we looked at a demo of the solution, COVID-19 hit,” said Veach. “That is when everything changed.” Within 24 hours of the initial COVID-19 national announcement, the team at Mebs Counseling had the Azalea Health telehealth solution fully operational. Azalea Health made telehealth free to all providers on the organization’s EHR to help manage through the crisis. Mebs Counseling administrators tested workflow, pulled together supporting documentation, and scheduled training sessions for providers to operationalize the solution.
