Our past article touched on the difference between the treatment of mental and physical health conditions. However, what we didn’t mention are the innovative companies that are addressing multiple chronic conditions, including behavioral health diagnoses. Integrating the care of mental and physical health leads to better outcomes. Lyn Health, a human-centric healthcare provider created for people with multiple chronic conditions, has seen improvement in patients first-hand. Chief Commercial Officer, Steve Andrzejewski shared more about the benefits of prioritizing behavioral health conditions, simplifying the healthcare experience, and offering polychronic care for employees.

How does addressing multiple chronic conditions benefit the care of behavioral health conditions?

Lyn Health believes all chronic conditions are of equal importance and often impact each other. Any attempt to address one, while not taking into account the others can put both the clinician's care plan(s) as well as the member's overall wellbeing at risk. Additionally, we must also account for the member's personal goals alongside their clinical needs as we develop a singular, holistic care plan for all the member's chronic conditions.  

Lastly, we continue to see the benefits of prioritizing BH conditions, early. This focus can both help build patient/clinician trust as well as prepare the patient mentally to tackle other chronic conditions they are burdened with, many of which have been for years.   

Tell us more about how Lyn Health is simplifying how patients access healthcare.

Lyn Health firmly believes that for the polychronic population, the current healthcare ecosystem is less than ideal.  After decades of 'status quo", we are seeing a rise in the loss of hope throughout this population. These polychronic patients are attempting to manage a PCP, 3-7 specialists, health plan, provider system, TPA and in many cases a host of single-point solution vendors. We have created a model that makes it nearly impossible for someone to manage both their clinical needs as well as their personal life 

Lyn Health innovates around love, empathy and compassion and ensures that the member is in the middle of our work. Wrapped around each member is Lyn's Care Circle, a team of clinicians that not only delivers virtual care, but also provides;  care navigation, care advocacy, care management, virtual PCP and urgent care, integrated behavioral health and community and social support resources, 24/7. If we are to address each patient's health in totality, providing a single point of contact for all clinical and administrative needs is crucial to success.

Specifically for employers, what are the benefits of offering polychronic care to employees? 

Employers today face many challenges as it relates to their benefits portfolio, including cost. As an industry, we know that roughly 40% of US adults are defined as being polychronic. Financially, this group drives 70% of our annual healthcare spend and is expected to grow to 84M people by the end of this decade.  If we continue to ignore the rise in prevalence rates, we are guaranteed to see a continued escalation in both condition severity and spend.