This article is sponsored by Broadstep Behavioral Health. In this Voices interview, Behavioral Health Business sits down with Broadstep President and CEO Lynn Mason to learn how the industry is adjusting to challenges posed by the pandemic. Mason breaks down the current behavioral health crisis in the U.S., shares the work Broadstep is doing to help solve it — and shares sobering statistics about the behavioral health challenges that women face today.
Behavioral Health Business: In September of 2019, you joined Broadstep as its new President and CEO. What career experiences do you most draw from in your role today?
Lynn Mason: I’ve been fortunate to serve in different roles at various types of health care companies following my career on Wall Street. We may not think Wall Street and behavioral health have a lot in common, but I draw from the business acumen taught in investment banking daily. Being able to evaluate a business, identify challenges and overcome them with a strategic approach is a huge part of being an investment banker — and those experiences are especially valuable in behavioral health.
After Wall Street, I began pursuing my MBA at Stanford. I wasn’t sure what came next for me, but Stanford’s vision — “Change lives. Change organizations. Change the world.” — resonated. These values emboldened my sense of servant leadership and helping other leaders to do so as well. At Broadstep, we encourage leading from the head, heart and hands, which means we are not exclusively analytical, technical or people-first. We bring all three of these to our service by combining the work of our hands, the problem-solving of our heads and the love of people in our hearts to everything we do. I’ll be forever grateful to Stanford for fostering that type of environment.
After business school, I had the opportunity to go to DaVita HealthCare Partners, which is known to be an operational powerhouse. To manage with excellence more than 2,400 dialysis facilities across the United States requires rallying regulators, officials and providers around a common cause. Behavioral health is no different, and I learned these lessons from some of the best leaders in kidney care.
Our industry is in the early stages of its business life cycle, which means now is the time to think about scaling behavioral health services. It will take all of us stakeholders aligned around common goals to accomplish this growth.
Broadstep was founded in 1972 as Willowglen then Phoenix Care Systems and rebranded in 2020. What is Broadstep’s mission, and what are the company’s goals for 2022?
Mason: When I joined the company in September of 2019 and started building the leadership team, we wanted to brand the organization with a name that alluded to the future. Our team members will take many broad steps within their careers and our individuals are on various paths to reach their goals. We want to support each person’s journey.
We’ll do that through our mission, which is threefold. If we are the best employer, we’ll attract high caliber staff to join our team and care for our individuals. By being the best provider, we will provide industry-leading care to individuals. And serving as the best community partner, we will work collaboratively with key stakeholders to innovate and continuously improve behavioral health.
By focusing on these three aspects of our mission, we’ll become America’s first choice.
That leads into our values, where we all vow to show up every day to ACE IT With Fun. That stands for Accountability, Compassion, Excellence, Integrity, Teamwork, Work, and of course, Fun. The day-to-day isn’t always fun, but we want to be intentional about creating fun in our space for our teammates and for our individuals. That’s an important value for us along with the rest of ACE IT and our goal moving forward is to build on that concept from an employer perspective.
Our goal for the next year is to further engage our workforce so they feel supported and successful during such challenging times. Accordingly, we are adding a number of services to our care continuum to build a more holistic provider offering.
To that point, becoming a community partner goes hand-in-hand with scale. We’ve recognized that our state agencies are operating across the entire state or region. If we don’t have the scale to serve them, we’re not going to be their partner of choice. We have to offer that scale and stay on the edge of ABA services and inpatient-outpatient types of services.
Give us the behavioral health landscape from your perspective, starting with the onset of the pandemic. What were the biggest needs and problems arising for employers?
Mason: The biggest problems for providers were and still remain keeping everyone safe and supporting staff to both care for families and safely come into our residences. Our DSPs (direct support professionals) do not have the option to directly care for individuals from home. Our sector of behavioral health is highly residential, and providers need direct service professionals, therapists and leaders physically within our homes. Broadstep has residences across seven states, and the greatest need still remains greatly talent people who are passionate about onsite support for our individuals.
The role is not easy. Our individuals are used to a certain routine, and once they could no longer leave the home, it was hard to manage their engagement, their care and their safety while keeping them from becoming frustrated. The direct service professional’s job became quite nuanced in working through these challenges.
About 90% of the source tracing of our COVID diagnoses within our residences and offices came from a teammate contracting the virus outside of Broadstep and subsequently bringing it in. This risk of the virus coming into our homes from the outside extended to visitations as well.
As a result, we had to significantly limit visitations and offsite visits. It created a lot of loneliness and regression of behaviors.
Now that we’ve been in the pandemic for over a year, what improvements are you seeing from employers in terms of addressing the challenges you just laid out?
Mason: We are getting really creative about staffing. The way we staff in health care is a bit antiquated. It’s still built around stringent 12-hour shifts. At one point, it was effective, but the pandemic forced us to look for better ways to staff for the health of our workforce. It also forced us to look at equity and pay across health care services. We hear all this rhetoric about how people aren’t coming back to work because they’re getting spoiled with government subsidies and the unemployment’s too high.
In reality we’ve had an entire support system crumble, with employees assuming more responsibility for kids and elderly parents. Working women professionals in our culture are disproportionately impacted by these competing and important priorities. Women comprise nearly three quarters of our DSP teammates, so we witness firsthand these challenges. When a caregiver earns $10 or $12 an hour and must pay for childcare or someone to help with an aging parent in a pandemic, working for us or anyone else might not make sense financially.
The silver lining is that it put more focus on state and company supported pay increases that should have happened in behavioral health a long time ago.
How is Broadstep addressing those needs and challenges?
Mason: We are committed to the overall health and wellness of our employee population. The mental wellbeing of people worldwide came into the spotlight due to the pandemic – there are so many dealing with loss, depression and PTSD.
We wanted to support our teammates in this way because they are on the front lines of this crisis. In addition to the stress of this pandemic, we became increasingly aware of the diseases of hypertension, diabetes and obesity significantly affecting our workforce. We began a partnership with the American Heart Association this year to bring physical, mental, spiritual and financial wellness programs into our organization.
Every month, we look at aspects of holistic wellbeing, such as smoking cessation, healthy living, healthy eating and financial wellbeing. Employers across all industries need to look at their employee health and wellness and say, “We as an organization have the scale and power to solve these problems, and not just rely on government programs to solve them. Let’s solve them ourselves.”
What is the most startling data point you’ve seen that paints a picture of America’s behavioral health crisis?
Mason: One that stands out to me is that a woman who has behavioral health challenges is five times more likely to be assaulted than other adult women. Even more abhorrent, a young girl is five times more likely to be sexually assaulted or molested than girls who do not have behavioral health challenges.
As a woman, this data hits me especially hard because our statistics in the United States and across the world are already pretty awful regarding safety and sexual assault crimes against women. These tragic events compromise the potential of a girl, a young woman or an adult woman. Women make up half the world’s census. So said another way, over half of our national and global population has little to no expectation of safety in her home, at her place of employment or in her community.
Now imagine it is five times worse for a fellow female citizen with I/DD (intellectual and developmental disabilities), severe mental illness or other behavioral health challenges.
What do you think the behavioral health problem will look like a year from now?
Mason: I think care will be better and diagnoses will increase. A light is being shone on behavioral health, eliminating the stigma around these topics. The pandemic openeda floodgate of people talking about their issues, and that is good.
A primary reason Bain Capital Double Impact expanded investment into I/DD and SPMI (serious and persistent mental illness) is because they saw the stigma around autism lifting. What if we kept compounding on what’s happening in autism and substance abuse by expanding that light onto I/DD and further aspects of behavioral health? I think we’ll find more people who need services and help. That’s why I say we’ll have more diagnoses, and I think we’ll be better off for it.
Entering this year, no one knew fully what to expect in the behavioral health space. What has been the biggest surprise in the industry so far, and what impact do you think it will have on the industry throughout the remainder of the year?
Mason: The biggest surprise for me has been the reluctance of behavioral health to go back to day programs since the world opened up in many other ways.
Here in Raleigh, North Carolina, for example, popular restaurants are so busy, you can’t get a reservation. It amazes me how those things opened up, but behavioral health did not enjoy the same freedom. For a whole year, we kept people very safe. We had no deaths within Broadstep, and a lot of my competitors had little to no deaths. We managed through the first phase of this pandemic and are now managing the variants.
However, if we don’t get our individuals out of the house and back to their day programs or in-person schools, we’re going to have a very different type of crisis on our hands.
Left unaddressed, our industry will find that interventions and help will be a lot more costly than we imagined. We’re going to have to put new conventions in place to avoid having individuals move backwards in their care as their routines remain significantly restricted.
Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Broadstep provides first-class behavioral health and supportive living services by being the nation’s best employer, provider, and community partner. To learn more about how Broadstep can help your business and employees, visit broadstep.com.
The Voices Series is a sponsored content program featuring leading executives discussing trends, topics and more shaping their industry in a question-and-answer format. For more information on Voices, please contact [email protected].
