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Archive: Population Health

Past projects for Blue Sky Institute’s Population Health pillar can be found below.

Homelessness

Blue Sky partnered with Boise State’s Idaho Policy Institute in 2018 to analyze Ada County’s homelessness service provider network and analyze opportunities for Boise State to make movements toward ending homelessness in the Treasure Valley. The report detailed a SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats), a network map, and analyzing operations of service providers.

This report identifies other ways the university could support this work in the community in an effort to live into its role as an anchor institution. The role of Blue Sky Institute in this effort is still evolving.

Mental Health

Some of Blue Sky’s very first work revolved around the mental health support systems in Idaho. We facilitated a partnership between Idaho’s two major hospital systems, the Department of Health and Welfare, and other key stakeholders to improve the support and resources available to address mental health crisis in our state.

Providing sufficient mental health services is one component of population health that has reached a crisis level in our region and across the state. Problems include creating alternatives to providing care for acute behavioral health problems at traditional hospital emergency departments—a situation that costs more than $2000/hour and creates “downstream” issues within those units. Early detection and intervention are huge challenges in the rural parts of our state and again, solutions represent a significant challenge.

As such, improving mental health outcomes requires intentional collaboration between stakeholders, including health providers, health payers, local or state governments, business leaders, university researchers and others who are committed to implementation of viable new models.

Focusing on mental health as the one of the inaugural focuses of Blue Sky, the mental health sector was formed with intent to:

  • Scope and define a specific population within population health on which to focus first, in this case mental health;
  • Map existing mental health efforts with the Treasure Valley, including a wide stakeholder group of hospitals, payers, individual providers, law enforcement and nonprofits;
  • Identify proven models and approaches around mental health from other cities and states;
  • Create a cross-sector, cross-disciplinary task force of leading practitioners and researchers to review the mapping and models in light of the collective aspiration to improve mental health outcomes;
  • Challenge the task force to create a community-relevant, innovative and phased master plan to address a continuum of care for mental health in the region by leveraging collaborative problem solving and joint accountability;
  • Steward the acquisition of necessary expertise and resources related to the mental health master plan not currently present in the Treasure Valley; and
  • Fund additive Treasure Valley and Boise State proposals to scale innovative or proven preventive mental health programs or to pilot new interventions that may achieve intended outcomes.

Out of this project, it became apparent that a state-wide plan was the next step in this process.