By Roger Rapoport Jan. 8, 2021Reprints
Mike Reddy for STAT
Hallie-Beth Hollister is a master at cold calling. She has to be.
She and a small team of psychiatric bed searchers are responsible for calling hospitals across Massachusetts any time a patient is in need of an inpatient psychiatric bed. At any given moment, 20 to 60 mental health patients are temporarily being cared for in one of the five hospital emergency departments covered by Behavioral Health Network, the Western Massachusetts-based emergency service provider where Hollister works. In complex cases, these searches have taken up to six weeks.
But unlike most health systems across the country, her team has a special tool to speed up that search: a dedicated, state-funded system to back them up. Massachusetts is home to a novel effort known as the Expedited Psychiatric Inpatient Admissions, or EPIA. Created in 2018 by the state’s mental health department, it is designed to cut the red tape to get psychiatric patients