Expanding Access to Behavioral Health Support

Thesis

Expanding how members could reach behavioral health support while redesigning the system behind the experience.

At Envolve, I led the 0→1 development of a text-based Behavioral Health Crisis Line channel and redesigned non-clinical intake, reducing non-crisis call handling 85% and generating $113,750 in annual operational savings.

The problem

The existing crisis-support model depended heavily on phone communication.

That created accessibility friction for members who might prefer or need another way to communicate, particularly in behavioral-health contexts.

At the same time, crisis-line resources were spending substantial time handling contacts that did not require crisis-level intervention.

Adding another communication channel without addressing that underlying workflow risked increasing demand on an already constrained system.

The insight / strategy

I approached access and operations as the same product problem.

Creating a text channel could make support easier to reach. But the service behind that channel also needed a better way to route people to the appropriate level of support.

The solution therefore had to redesign both the member entry point and what happened after someone entered the system.

What I built / led

I drove end-to-end 0→1 development of a text-based Behavioral Health Crisis Line communication channel, expanding the ways members could reach support.

Alongside it, I designed and implemented a non-clinical intake model that reduced the amount of non-crisis work handled by crisis resources.

Rather than treating the digital channel as an isolated feature, we designed the surrounding workflow so the operating model could support it.

Project snapshot

Company: Centene / Envolve
Role: Product Owner, Patient & Care Management Applications
Scope: Behavioral health, member communication, crisis-support operations
My contribution: 0→1 product development, workflow and intake design, cross-functional implementation
Users: Health-plan members and behavioral-health support teams
Headline outcome: 85% reduction in non-crisis call handling + $113,750 annual savings

Critical product decisions

The easiest version of this project would have been to add texting to the existing workflow.

That would also have left the fundamental capacity problem untouched.

We deliberately addressed routing and intake alongside channel expansion so increased accessibility wouldn't simply translate into increased burden for crisis resources.

The design also had to preserve appropriate escalation and human involvement in a behavioral-health environment where getting the classification wrong carried meaningful consequences.

Leadership & scale

The initiative required coordination across product, technology, behavioral-health operations, and clinical stakeholders.

I had an unusual advantage here because my earlier career included health coaching, clinical education, population health, and behavior-change work. That helped me translate between the operational realities of healthcare delivery and what the technology needed to enable.

Outcomes

The text channel expanded member access to behavioral-health support.

The redesigned intake model reduced non-crisis call handling by 85% and generated approximately $113,750 in annual operational savings.

It also became part of broader work modernizing patient communication and care-management workflows.

What I took forward

The interface is only one part of a healthcare product.

Whenever a product connects someone to a real-world service, I follow the workflow beyond the screen: who receives the request, what information they have, what decision they make, where it goes next, and what happens when something doesn't fit the happy path.

That's often where the biggest opportunities are hiding.