Emerging Adults with Mental Illness: Introduction to Series

We need our emerging adults healthy in spirit, mind, body. How can we learn more about their exploding mental illness? Start with people with lived experience.

Podcast intro

Welcome to Health Hats, the Podcast. I’m Danny van Leeuwen, a two-legged cisgender old white man of privilege who knows a little bit about a lot of healthcare and a lot of our very little. We will listen and learn about what it takes to adjust to life’s realities in the awesome circus of healthcare. Let’s make some sense of all of this.

Four stories to set the stage

Behavioral health managed care

Health Hats: About 30 years ago, I worked for a behavioral health managed care company. We put together a provider advisory panel and a member advisory panel. It was novel at that time, and we pulled these groups together to get direct feedback about our services, and one of the issues that both groups had in common was the onerous nature of preauthorization. So that meant when a member, a patient, went to a provider, a psychologist, a psychiatrist, or a social worker, they had to call a call center and get seven or ten visits authorized before treatment could start. They found this onerous, and we looked into it and realized it…