Project reality's ccbhc improvement and advancement project to expand and sustain ccbhc services - since our opening in 1970, project reality (PR) has served individuals in utah with a broad range…

Project reality's ccbhc improvement and advancement project to expand and sustain ccbhc services - since our opening in 1970, project reality (PR) has served individuals in utah with a broad range of health issues, including psychiatric and substance use disorders (SUD), complicated by significant psycho-social stressors, such as housing instability and homelessness, trauma, and limited access to resources. Our ccbhc-e program, awarded in 2020, enabled PR to expand the expertise of its staff and increase its capacity to address immediate and long-term needs of high-risk adults, as well as older adolescents, with any suds diagnosis, psychiatric illness, and/or physical health condition not adequately served in traditional healthcare settings. In PR's initial year of ccbhc-e funding, we expanded our services to 266 unduplicated spars patients between june 1 - 2021 - february 14, 2022. During this first grant year, PR increased staff to allow for the expansion of our services, resulting in 597 patients receiving care from one of our providers and 2,031 screens by PR staff. We used our partnerships to offer covid-19 testing to 459 individuals and vaccination to 40 individuals at our clinics. We now offer mental health and primary care services, in addition to our traditional SUD and OTP services to any individual in need of these services including those who cannot pay. The goals for the ccbhc-IA grant are goal 1: as a newly established ccbhc-e, we will improve and advance efforts to provide comprehensive, integrated primary care, substance use disorder (SUD) treatment, mental health (MH) services and crisis care, accepting MH or SUD patients regardless of ability to pay and expanding accessibility to underserved communities. In addition, we will achieve full sustainability to ensure delivery of services once federal funding ends. Goal 2: increase retention as measured by increased program attendance and reduced drop-out rates. Advance and expand our current programs that are tailored specifically to populations at high-risk of drop-out and place patients with sever substance use, stigmatized mental illness, frequent hospitalizations, homelessness, criminal justice system involvement, and others not responding well to traditional outpatient care in a newly created free-standing facility located in the downtown area of salt lake city. We plan to serve 400 unduplicated patients the first 2 years and 450 unduplicated patients in years 3-4 with a total of 1700 over the four years of the project. We plan to improve and advance these goals by increasing accessibility, availability, and utilization of services by increasing and maintaining overall enrollment in our program to our fullest capacity. As a part of this expansion PR will increase access to individuals with SUD or MH issues by 35%; we will open and operate a satellite location in underserved and rural population areas including veterans; we will stratify the population into two distinct categories based on severity of disease and CO-occurring psychiatric and social risk factors; increase evidence based group therapy for specialized populations; partnering and embedding a staff member in the salt lake county jail RE-entry program. Additionally, we will hire needed staff and improve our data tracking system. PR is currently adhering to all the required activities of a ccbhc and will improve and advance those that we identified in our proposal.