Based in New York City, AsOne was founded by six partnering institutions: Acacia Network; Community Healthcare Network (CHN); The Door; Institute for Community Living (ICL); The New York Foundling; and Rising Ground. AsOne now includes numerous additional providers serving low-income and high need populations.
Having spent many years in the government and non-profit healthcare sectors, the co-founding organizations of AsOne saw siloed and disjointed attributes in care delivery that were failing the types of individuals and families they served. They believed it was imperative to address these faults through an innovative approach that focused on changing the poor health outcomes and high utilization of today while also preventing the costly health needs for the future.
The Idea was simple: deliver the whole scope of care and services an entire family needs to become and stay healthy in one seamless approach across a spectrum of providers.
Targeting both children and adults of all ages, the model of care would use data to target and risk stratify the population and center all care on proven evidence-based methods. The collaborative would seek to improve the health and lives of not only one client or patient at a time, but entire families at once, in an effort to break the cycle of a myriad of co-occurring illnesses and ailments that often afflict high-risk families and communities. This treatment approach would be based on the premise that health, recovery and overall well-being cannot be achieved in a vacuum and without addressing the health and social needs of an individual’s loved ones and safety-net.
Through leveraging the founding organization’s strong connections with colleagues across the spectrum of behavioral health, primary care and the social service sectors in New York City, the concept of the AsOne collaborative was born. Rooted in evidenced-based models and community-based care the vision for a truly family-focused and clinically integrated treatment system began to take shape.
In 2011, New York state (NYS) began a multi-faceted process of redesigning and reforming its Medicaid program including a transition to a value-based reimbursement model that is currently underway. Over the years, many of these initiatives took root in the primary care and physical health sectors; behavioral health providers, including many non-profit and community-based organizations who provide health and social support services, would need additional resources and support to fully participate in the shift to a new value-driven payment system. To respond to this need, in 2018 NYS released a grant initiative to help support capacity building for providers to increase their readiness to operate in value-based payment (VBP) environments. The overall goals of the readiness program were to prepare behavioral health providers to participate in VBP arrangements and to encourage payers to work with behavioral health providers. This grant provided an opportunity to bring the vision of the AsOne co-founders to life, as it would fund organizations to form “Behavioral Health Care Collaboratives” and build the necessary infrastructure to enable collective quality oversight and improvement, data and information sharing, and create a legal structure which would allow for contracting with payers on behalf of the group.
