Timothy Zercher 0:00

Well, Sarah, thank you so much for joining us. I really appreciate you taking time.

Sara Gotheridge 0:03

Oh, glad to be here, Tim.

Timothy Zercher 0:05

Absolutely. Absolutely. So you've spent 20 years in psychiatry and behavioral health leadership. What first drew you into the field and what's continued to motivate you and keep you engaged for a long career already?

Sara Gotheridge 0:19

Well, well, actually, I'm a rather unusual entrant to the field of psychiatry. I started my career in technology back when technology was a big strategy of moving companies forward. I did that for a little over 10 years. And quite frankly, the technology was interesting, but the people were way more interesting. So this was really a journey of revisiting an old idea about going into medicine about people. So I went to medical school for psychiatry in particular.

Timothy Zercher 0:51

That's awesome. That's awesome. Very direct. This is way more interesting. So I'm going to go in there.

Sara Gotheridge 0:56

And no doubt, and it has remained so. It's not changed at all over the years. It's such a challenging field. I think, you know, I'm biased. I don't think anything is more difficult than behavioral health. And I tell my fellow leaders and CEO that all the time. This is really hard. But I've been able at Array Behavioral Care to pull in technology as well.

Timothy Zercher 1:19

Yeah. Which I'm sure is a valuable, a valuable piece of your career, even if it's not the primary focus anymore. So you've helped build and scale multiple behavioral health organizations across different, I believe, kind of care settings. What do you believe health systems still misunderstand most about integrating behavioral health into the broader kind of continuum of care?

Sara Gotheridge 1:40

Well, I think first we have to align on what outcomes are as a field. We don't have a real standard outcome measure in our field of behavioral health. So that's first. What is a good outcome? What is the goal? We can't really meet and reach a goal in a targeted way unless we know what it is. That's where we're still working. We don't have common outcomes. We don't have common goals. And the technology is still very separated, very disparate. There are so many companies building integration engines. It's too hard. It's too costly. It's tough to implement. We need to be more nimble in our use of information to provide really good care.

Timothy Zercher 2:23

Absolutely. Absolutely. So Array, I know, is focused on solving some of the workforce shortages that I think everyone is seeing through team-based and virtual care models. What innovations are you most excited about when it comes to expanding access without compromising quality of care?

Sara Gotheridge 2:41

Sure. Well, I think there are three things, Tim. The first one is that as a company, we decided our strategy would be to go with Epic as our EMR. And over the last three years, we've converted to Epic. The reason being that there actually isn't another fully telehealth behavioral health company in the country that is on Epic. Epic is the integrator. It is just the head of the field. It integrates behavioral health with all of other medicine in a way that no other EMR does. So it helps us enter that integrated world where behavioral medicine isn't separate from physical medicine. That's the first one. The second strategy is really outcome-based. And we design our treatment to assess an individual where they are in a point in time in terms of acuity, depression, anxiety, social determinants of health, and then decide the next steps that fit that individual and follow the outcome measures as they move along treatment. At times, we may be able to proactively see they're getting worse and increase or change treatment, or see that, you know, we've reached stability or we've reached our goals and reduce treatment. So it's really acuity-lined care pathways that are, of course, technologically supported because it's detailed and it's hard. The third thing is building models that are future forward AI that help us know what the outcome model should be in the future, such as risk assessment. A Ray has an over 25-year history of treating people in the emergency department. Yeah. So we see tough people, we see scary situations. Their life or death decisions most of the time come into the hospital, be discharged. So we're really developing a detailed risk stratification model to help us make the right decisions, clinical decision support for clinicians, that it helps us predict in a way that behavioral health can't do very well. And really is a basis for future AI models, I think. Right now, if one were to build an AI model, we don't know what the answer should be. That's what this is about. What is the right answer in a degree of sophistication that we haven't yet reached in behavioral health care?

Timothy Zercher 5:10

Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, and it's so complicated with behavioral health, especially because so many of the pieces to measure are hard to measure. It's hard to measure how someone really feels or what they're really thinking. It's a lot easier to measure how broken is the foot, right?

Sara Gotheridge 5:25

Yes, or to look at an EKG. You know, that you can look at it and you can read it. You know, in behavioral health care, you have the moment that we have some tools to measure, the moment of mood or the moment of attention deficit. But you also have to look at the full context of history, the context of family history. Context is everything. Past information is everything. So building models that bring all that information together to guide which item is most salient in the moment. It has the most impact for the next decision is critical.

Timothy Zercher 6:03

Absolutely. I bet that, yeah, it sounds both very complex and also very exciting to build to start exploring and building. So what have you found is the hardest part of building an organization, building a team now that you've I know you've built several in your career?

Sara Gotheridge 6:19

Um, I wouldn't say this is the hardest part first. I'd say the most important part is stay aligned on the mission. Why are we here? What are we doing? And what are all the pieces that fill into this mission that we're trying to achieve? I wouldn't say that's harder, but that's the most critical. I think the hardest aspect of this is because we are a service provider. We do need to provide our services to other healthcare providers. It's integrating with them. And in fact, it's helping them understand what the primary mission in behavioral health is. It used to be access. Oh, we need some therapy, we need some men management. That's not the right answer anymore. There's a lot of access. The right answer is doing the right things at the right time to achieve the outcomes that help someone gain wellness and a more productive life.

Timothy Zercher 7:13

Absolutely. What have you found that works best, especially outside of word of mouth for talent recruitment, for building those teams?

Sara Gotheridge 7:21

Well, word of mouth is a really good one. I won't count that one out. We have a very active recruiting arm that not only is using the internet, of course, in all different ways, but we keep our eye on the behavioral health corporate space because players are coming and going. That may be the next company that is now not meeting their promises or going out of business or can't figure it out suddenly provides all sorts of providers to their requests.

Timothy Zercher 7:52

Highly qualified, highly trained providers.

Sara Gotheridge 7:54

Yeah, we're happy to say, come join our clinical family, and we have a good home for you.

Timothy Zercher 7:59

I think that's a good strategy. That's a good strategy to yeah, to swoop in and be the rescue for careers of very talented people, I'm sure.

Sara Gotheridge 8:07

It is. I will say that you know, the market is very competitive. There's a lot of providers around now that didn't used to be around. And we're competing in a big ocean for talent. I think that our mission to provide great care and be a clinical home and be a practice at scale for people is a winning combination right now. It's playing pretty well. We really mean it. We're very suitable about it.

Timothy Zercher 8:34

Absolutely. Which shows, right? And that it shows, I think, to talent that's looking at options and also to clients, right? If you stay aligned on the mission, like you said, if you stay focused on the true value that you bring, it shows in every way and probably helps on in almost every perspective as well.

Sara Gotheridge 8:48

Yes. And we hear that from the people that we're hiring.

Timothy Zercher 8:52

That's good. That's very good. Perfect. Well, thank you so much, Sarah. We appreciate you joining us. We appreciate you taking time and we appreciate the work that you're doing with your team.

Sara Gotheridge 9:00

Thanks, Tim. I could talk about these things all day long. So happy to connect with you.

Timothy Zercher 9:06

Absolutely. Thank you.