Fighting Addiction in New Mexico: One Organization’s IT-Driven Approach

Senior leaders at Rehoboth McKinley Christian Health Care Services (RMCHCS), a Gallup, N.M.-based integrated rural hospital that offers behavioral health options, have always subscribed to the theory that identifying the root causes of addiction in the patients it treats will make a big difference in their future health and well-being.

The patient care organization’s behavioral health services range from 90-day residential treatment to a step-down intensive outpatient program and an outpatient mental health clinic. Like many around the country, the hospital—which provides wrap-around behavioral and physical health services for a large community suffering from trauma-induced alcoholism, drug addiction and other mental health issues—has made significant inroads in adopting technology that improves care collaboration on the clinical side, but it’s been a struggle on the behavioral health services front, which has historically operated on paper records.

For instance, explains David Conejo, the CEO of RMCHCS, on the behavioral health side of the system, basic patient assessments would be manually conducted at the time of entry, but that would result in data siloes where critical patient information doesn’t move from one care provider to the next. But then in 2017, the healthcare system linked up with Zoeticx, a developer of preventive healthcare resource planning software, which integrates and streamlines data from the Center for Medicaid & Medicare Services (CMS) including annual wellness visits (AWV), chronic care management, and care transition between physical and behavioral health services.