University of Washington/Harborview Medical Center Behavioral Health Institute

On behalf of the University of Washington/Harborview Medical Center Behavioral Health Institute (BHI), we gratefully acknowledge the Northwest Regional Telehealth Resource Center for its amazing support and collaboration with the BHI during this unprecedented public health crisis created by COVID-19. 

To meet this health care challenge, front line Behavioral Health Providers (BHPs) across Washington State needed to quickly pivot to provide critical ongoing telemental health (TMH) and substance use disorder treatment and support. To help these providers be prepared to provide quality TMH care, the BHI quickly initiated a series of trainings for BHPs designed to provide a TMH foundation from which these providers would be able to provide a wide range of TMH services for a broad patient population, especially Medicaid and underserved groups. For these TMH trainings to be successful, the BHI Telehealth Training team quickly realized it needed to partner with the NRTRC, who welcomed this partnership and generously offered numerous resources to include Subject Matter Expert guidance and online content such as the telemental health toolkit. Without the support of the NRTRC, these initial TMH trainings would not have succeeded. Because of their support, hundreds of BHPs completed this training and are providing ongoing critical mental health care to their patients. 

Based on the wonderful success of this partnership with NRTRC, the BHI has once again reached out to work with the NRTRC to provide a 6-part online “TeleBehavioral Health 101” training series, which will also meet newly mandated telehealth training requirements for health care providers in Washington State. The BHI team is completely confident this future partnership will be as or more successful than the last. 

It has been a delight to work with the NRTRC staff. We so appreciate how helpful, incredibly responsive, enthusiastic, and generous with their time they have been in supporting our mutual goals, mentoring BHI leadership, and seeking future opportunities for collaboration.