Scaling Pediatric Mental Health Care with an Automated Healthcare CRM

Who Is Handspring Health?

Handspring Health provides behavioral health care for children, adolescents and young adults.  Their mission is to create a world where children are empowered to lead resilient and fulfilling lives and to ultimately graduate out of therapy.

Goals for Handspring Health

Handspring Health’s big picture goals include making outpatient therapy more accessible and affordable for those needing treatment, having no waitlist for care, and providing in-network care to as many children as possible through vast insurance partnerships. Another goal in sight is to expand from virtual care to creating infrastructure for in-person care due to face-to-face care benefits for children and adolescents. 

What Handspring Health has been solving for: 

At their genesis, Handspring Health partnered with Welkin Health in order to support their business’s objectives to make adolescent therapy more accessible. Some of the major items they were looking to solve for when they brought on the platform were: 

Find a platform that makes life easy for their therapists

The two co-founders and their team were looking for a solution where they could create an environment that would better the user experience for their therapists.

“As a therapist myself that was my goal. With other EHRs I’ve used there was too much extra stuff that I didn’t need to use. We could customize Welkin with just what we wanted to have, and not have anything slowing the therapists down. We also wanted to look for something that we could connect via APIs with our external tools.” explains Megan Martino, Head of Clinical Operations at Handspring Health. 

Scale processes through automation: 
“We have a lot of helpful automations set up in Welkin.” says Martino. 

Handspring Health is leveraging automation for many of their processes in order to scale care and increase efficiencies. A few things that they’re solving for using a handful of Welkin’s diverse automations are: 

• Capture patient progress over time by automating monthly assessments to patients and their loved ones
• Map assessment data points automatically to patient charts 
• Reduce manual task setting by automatically creating reminders for therapists and supervisors
• Streamline patient program enrollment by automating intake workflow 

Regarding automated task management Martino mentions, “It’s very nice for the therapist, they automatically get reminded via our built-in automation rather than having to remember every single detail and when each task is due.” 

Support multiple patient programs 

Welkin Health enables organizations to build multiple concurrent patient programs. Each can have separate phases and associated automations and rule sets behind each one. Handspring for example uses separate programs by diagnosis type, and manages each protocol accordingly.

Handspring leverages multiple phases within each program. For example, intake, assessment, weekly sessions, and discharge phases. Within each of these they can templatize documentation requirements at specific points of treatment, easily track progression in the different phases, and build automations around each element such as communication, tasks, assessments, etc. 

“It’s so nice to be able to say this child is 12, they have anxiety, they’re in the child anxiety program, and then they automatically get the forms that we want them and their family to fill out. This takes a lot of pressure off the therapist to figure out which forms they want to use and when they need to be completed.” expounds Martino. 

Find flexible program builder 

Handspring Health was also looking for building flexibility as a key component from their software partner. 

Martino adds “One of the best things about Welkin was we could create every note that we wanted therapists to complete, we could write every form we wanted families to fill out, all the wording and questions could be exactly what we wanted them to be. Other systems just didn’t have that functionality.”  

Also commenting on the ease of use, Martino said: “I’m a clinician, so for me there was a learning curve. But with some training, I figured out how to create all the forms, assessments, the therapist views when they logged in, etc. I was able to build it all out.”  

Build a well-rounded technology stack 

Handspring is building their ideal technology ecosystem. At the heart of it is Welkin, and then they have incorporated additional systems in order to streamline all their workflows as their business evolves. For instance, they have integrated Welkin with Acuity, which they use as a patient self-scheduling platform and to coordinate appointments across multiple calendars.

Automate intake process 

Handspring also has integrated their lead generation process directly into their Welkin database. Once a new patient and/or their family member is ready to schedule their first session with a therapist, the intake team maps information into Welkin.  

The therapists value how prepared they can be when they have their assessment session with the patient and his or her family as a result. The therapist can open up that patient’s profile in Welkin and see pre-populated charts and relevant patient information.

“The charts being automatically created are really nice, it really makes the workflow for our intake coordinators so much easier.” says Martino

Track individual patient progression

Handspring uses Welkin to measure individual progress and share that progress with the patient. When measures get completed and sent automatically back into Welkin, data points are logged and instantly visualized in chart and graph form.

“Therapists can visually see GAD7 progress slowly going down. We’ll share this to our clients as well and show the progress, and open up a conversation with the patient and their family visually using that data.” 

Conclusion: 

Since launching their business, Handspring has seen impressive growth. The team successfully scaled from serving New Jersey in 2021 to a total of six states this year. To support this rapid growth the team at Handspring onboarded additional talented therapists. Today, Handspring’s patients have access to 6x more therapists compared to 2021.

Handspring began their operation with six different programs to support their patient population, and since has increased the number of programs by 50%. These programs are representative of the thoughtful expansion by age ranges and different diagnoses to offer more care to their new and established patients.

With all their infrastructure in place, Handspring is able to be more agile when it comes to delivering care. The key objective of bringing on new technology was to take the administrative burden off therapists, and we see them doing this with great success while using Welkin’s platform. 

Everyone at Welkin is excited to see how innovative care continues to progress at Handspring.  Thank you so much for your insights, Megan!