Finding and maintaining outpatient mental health services is a challenge, leading many individuals with behavioral health issues to seek care at emergency departments.

Our Pledge to Connect program aims to connect emergency department (ED) patients to timely outpatient behavioral healthcare. In the longer term, our goal is to make sure behavioral healthcare access is available before an emergency visit occurs.

Pledge to Connect takes lessons learned from our 7-Day Pledge initiative — a city-wide effort to connect Medicaid patients to primary care within seven days of hospital discharge — and applies them to behavioral health. This project is also aligned with the performance targets for behavioral healthcare connection set out by New Jersey’s Quality Improvement Program (QIP-NJ).

Connecting ED patients to timely outpatient care

Pledge to Connect partners include two Certified Community Behavioral Health Clinics, Oaks Integrated Care and Acenda Integrated health, and four major health systems, Cooper University Health Care, Virtua Health, Jefferson Health and Inspira Health.

In the first phase of Pledge to Connect, we tested two new pathways to connect ED patients who have behavioral health needs to timely outpatient care: a telephonic model where navigators reached out to patients by phone and an in-person model where navigators were embedded in the ED. We learned that in-person engagement matters:

• 100% of eligible individuals referred to Pledge to Connect between July 1, 2023 and June 30, 2024 who accepted support from an in-person navigator got a scheduled intake appointment, compared to only 28% of those engaged by phone.
• Of those who accepted in-person navigation support, 51% went on to attend an intake appointment within an average of 15 days after their ED visit, compared to only 11% of those engaged by phone.

Implement the Pledge to Connect model in your community

Interested in creating a similar program in your community? Want to know how we go from identifying a problem in our ecosystem of care to developing and implementing a shared solution? Check out the Pledge to Connect implementation guide, which includes instructions and tools to replicate the program or modify it to fit your community’s needs, as well as important lessons learned through the pilot period.