Throughout April, we are celebrating National Volunteer Month and the individuals who give their time to volunteering in their communities and for causes they care about. Anita Kelly, clinical contract advisor for Magellan Behavioral Health of Pennsylvania, along with a group of colleagues will be volunteering for the Rails to Trails Conservatory, a national organization, to Celebrate Trails Day on April 26.

Continue reading to learn more about how Anita and her team plan to celebrate Trails Day in Pennsylvania counties:

What volunteer work do you participate in and for what organizations?

This year, many of us from the various counties around Pennsylvania are volunteering to do cleanup work on the Rails to Trails paths within our communities. Since the pandemic, most of us are working from home and only gathering once or twice a year. This volunteer opportunity provides us with a chance to get together with our coworkers in a relaxed environment, while simultaneously providing a service to the community and getting out and enjoying a beautiful spring day!

How did you get involved volunteering for this organization?

This will mark the first year that Magellan Behavioral Health of Pennsylvania is taking on the Rails to Trails in our communities, but we have had such a great response from everyone that I really hope this becomes an annual event. The Rails to Trails organizations were very appreciative of our willingness to get involved and help with the annual trail cleanup job. These organizations rely on community volunteers to maintain the trails and keep them in good condition for all to enjoy.

Why is it important for others to volunteer in their communities?

It is the responsibility of those of us who do have resources to spread love, hope and joy to help others in our communities who lack necessary resources. When I volunteered for Meals on Wheels, my eyes were opened to the plight of some of our senior citizens. Many of those individuals also just wanted the opportunity to be able to connect with other individuals to combat loneliness.

Is there anything else about the importance of National Volunteer Week you’d like to highlight?

It’s important to introduce the notion of volunteering in your community to children at a young age. It’s also important that they see adults who they respect and admire engaging in volunteer activities within the community.

Challenges and obstacles create opportunities. Even since before the start of the pandemic, the provider community has dealt with workforce development challenges, especially in the field of behavioral health. As the demand for mental health and substance use disorder services have increased, so have the opportunities for a career in behavioral health for individuals at all experience levels.

Throughout the nation, healthcare workers are experiencing significant levels of burnout due to the pandemic. This once in a lifetime event has impacted the mental health of clinicians and has overly extended the existing provider workforce that was already experiencing a critical shortage. Although this is a widespread problem, rural areas and minority communities are more greatly affected. Many individuals living in these areas don’t have easy access to local primary care or mental health providers.

In Pennsylvania, there are currently a variety of job opportunities available, ranging from clinical, technical, and administrative roles of all experience levels. These roles in behavioral healthcare all provide the opportunity to make a positive impact in the lives of children, adolescence, and adults.

Watch this video created by Magellan Behavioral Health of Pennsylvania to learn more about the benefits of working in the behavioral health field.

As a Medical Director for Magellan Behavioral Health of Pennsylvania, Chris Squillaro, DO, manages many different responsibilities. As a supervisor of the Pennsylvania medical staff, he performs reviews, attends complaint and grievance hearings, and leads various rounds with our care managers. Dr. Squillaro also provides the executive leadership with input on strategy and focusing on prioritizing what’s important to our county customers. Whenever a medical opinion or perspective is needed, Dr. Squillaro, who has been with Magellan since 2021, always provides that medical input into the initiatives and intervention being done in Pennsylvania. Continue reading to learn more about what innovative behavioral health projects and initiatives Dr. Squillaro is currently working on in Pennsylvania:

What sort of innovative projects are you currently working on?

There’s an enterprise-wide movement to develop a common suicide pathway to decrease suicidality. Pennsylvania is heavily involved with that project although it involves more than just Pennsylvania. I’ve been working on this with the corporate and Pennsylvania leadership.

We are also doing a project in Pennsylvania called Project Red, which aims to decrease readmission rates and standardize the discharge process. This is a project that’s being led by two researchers out of Massachusetts who had developed Project Red originally for the medical side, and they want to convert it to the behavioral side.

I’m also involved in a trauma informed care summit because of a Pennsylvania Commonwealth initiative. The goal is to transition all the Commonwealth residential treatment facilities to tiered trauma designations that demonstrate competency in trauma care for children and adolescents in that level of care. Included in this would be consistent trauma screening and treatment, decreasing physical and chemical restraints, having a trauma informed lens as patients move through care and awareness of experiences in the milieu that may be triggering.

We also have a medication adherence project where I clinically supervise the pharmacist who is working on improving medication adherence for some of our more severe patients through direct member education and training.

Why is Magellan Behavioral Health of Pennsylvania the best place to do these projects?

I think we have a holistic view of the healthcare delivery system, not just within individual units across the country but enterprise wide. We have our eyes on national issues through touchpoints with the corporate team. We understand what Pennsylvania’s priorities are, what their initiatives are, and what issues are important to them. We can get even more granular at a county level. Each county is in tune with what are its’ constituents wants and needs. Pennsylvania is very diverse, there are swings in socioeconomic status between regions and resources. We get this population health view at a national level, that then is informed all the way down to the county level so we can see it not only for what’s important from a national perspective, but then in each Pennsylvania community. With that information, we can come up with the best way to approach problems.

I think there’s also a lot of willingness and eagerness to use technology at Magellan. It helps us to sort and track outcomes. Magellan is really getting involved with technology, this is something that’ll be hugely helpful for what we can do in the future.

What are your thoughts on the culture at Magellan Health? How has that culture impacted the projects you’re working on?

Before I worked at Magellan, I was a provider. Magellan has always been willing to try new things. If providers had a good way of solving common problems, in my experience, Magellan was certainly willing to entertain it and develop programming around it. I think that willingness to adapt, change, and try new things is what makes projects successful. The culture of being able to move around problems and to adapt is one of the things I saw since before working at Magellan and has only been reaffirmed since I’ve joined this team.

What direction do you see healthcare going in? Have you noticed any exciting trends in the healthcare industry? What lessons are there to learn in other industries that can be applied to healthcare?

I feel we are learning from the way that care is delivered on the medical side. Using outcomes and data to make decisions is one of the things that’s exciting in behavioral health. Some screening tools that have been developed have become more reliable and it’s starting to create a common language that we can have with our medical counterparts. This then creates opportunities to coordinate at key levels of care. There’s also a lot more collaboration between medical and behavioral health. It’s not new information that behavioral health has a significant impact on medical costs overall and medical quality. I see medicine becoming more integrative. On the behavioral health side, we’re catching up on the importance of data-driven decision-making outcomes and managing from a population health perspective.

Another trend is in customer care. We are learning from industries where customer satisfaction is critical to ease of access, utilization, adherence, and adoption of a plan. We’re doing a lot of customer surveys and making sure people are happy with the service that they’re getting.

Lastly, we’re adopting the standardization and checklist mentality that I most associate with the airline industry. This is a public safety concern that has been effectively managed by airlines to assure safety and limit mistakes. We are utilizing and promoting standardized tools and checklists to consistently diagnosis issues. We are then using algorithms to standardize treatment pathways. This assures consistencies across providers and assures that the most appropriate evidence-based interventions are being utilized to treat people.

Magellan Behavioral Health of Pennsylvania, Inc., a Medicaid managed care organization (MCO), started as the new HealthChoices behavioral health exclusive contractor for the Cambria County Behavioral Health Services Program on July 1, 2017. Magellan currently administers behavioral health benefits for Medicaid members through HealthChoices contracts with Bucks, Delaware, Lehigh, Montgomery and Northampton counties.

Magellan has over two decades of experience managing behavioral health benefits for HealthChoices members through close collaboration with members, providers and community organizations. Through this collaborative mindset, Magellan has succeeded in producing innovative efforts in the following areas:

• increases in access to care
• improved service use rates
• expansion of the continuum of services in alignment with evidence-based models
• maximization of clinical appropriateness
• nationally recognized level of quality services

Read more about Magellan’s collaboration with Cambria County, local providers, community organizations and members in the Tribune Democrat: New Behavioral Health Provider Brings Options, Jobs to Cambria County.