FY 2023 assertive community treatment - the prairie ridge integrated behavioral healthcare assertive community treatment (act) grant will focus on expanding the reach of our existing act team

Prairie ridge integrated behavioral healthcare (prairie ridge) is a nonprofit community-based provider of integrated behavioral healthcare in north central iowa. Our catchment area consists of eight, largely rural counties (cerro gordo, floyd, mitchell, worth, winnebago, kossuth, hancock, and franklin) that are significantly underserved. All eight counties are designated by hrsa as medicaid mental health professional shortage areas (hpsas). In 2020, prairie ridge initiated our medicaid-only assertive community treatment (act) program to provide intensive support and treatment services to individuals with serious mental illness (SMI) living within a 25-mile radius of mason city. However, that 250-mile radius only covers a small portion of our geographically expansive service area. A significant portion of residents living in the eight counties we serve have no access to an act team. When individuals with SMI cannot access act, they are often more easily lost to behavioral health care and have more frequent hospitalizations. Based on these significant gaps, we are proposing to expand our act program's radius to the entirety of the eight counties in our catchment area. Our population of focus is adults and transition-aged consumers 18 and over with SMI or serious emotional disturbance (SED) who live within the entirety of our eight-county service area. In alignment with those needs, prairie ridge's goals and measurable objectives include: 1) expand our current act program to serve individuals in a larger geographic area; 2) support act consumers to build recovery capital and address their whole person needs to help them live safely and with stability in their communities of choice; and 3) improve health and functioning of act consumers to decrease their mortality rates. Number to be served: through this expansion of our act team, we will increase access to 24/7, evidence-based, multidisciplinary team-based services for adults and transition-aged consumers 18 and over with SMI and SED including the following numbers of clients served each year: 40 unduplicated individuals by the end of YEAR1; 15 additional unduplicated individuals by the end of year 2 (for a total of 55 individuals being served); 7 additional unduplicated individuals in year 3 (for a total of 62 individuals served); and 6 additional unduplicated individuals in years 4 and 5 (for a total of 74 individuals served).