Telecare Partners in Wellness Open House

Click here to watch the open house celebration for Telecare's Partners in Wellness program.

The Telecare Partners in Wellness program, along with the County of Santa Clara and Third Sector Capital Partners, Inc., hosted an open house for community stakeholders and members on February 8 at their new facility in San Jose, CA.

"Telecare opens many new programs, but this has been a unique experience in terms of the level of effort invested by so many parties to launch this innovative model,” said Anne Bakar, President and CEO of Telecare. "We are thrilled to have been chosen by Santa Clara for this important work. It is in perfect alignment with the value we place on public/private partnerships as the industry shifts toward performance-based funding.”

Opened on September 14, 2016, Telecare Partners in Wellness is the nation's first mental health focused Pay for Success (PFS) project. The program aims to provide community-based mental health services to individuals in Santa Clara County who have a severe mental illness, with the goal of measurably improving wellbeing and quality of life while reducing more costly service usage, including the psychiatric emergency room and inpatient psychiatric settings.

PFS is a performance-oriented contracting model that drives government resources toward social programs that best provide results to the people who need them most. Through this model, Santa Clara County has contracted Keith Humphreys of Stanford University, who is conducting a rigorous 6-year evaluation of the program.

“With this project and our prior Pay for Success project, the County is better defining our objectives in serving vulnerable populations, and is creating incentives that ensure service providers achieve those objectives,” said Chief Assistant County Counsel Greta Hansen. “Through the evaluations of each program, we will have a much better understanding of how to further increase the impact of these and other programs going forward.”

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Speakers for the event included Anne Bakar, President and CEO of Telecare; Greta Hansen, Chief Assistant County Counsel for Santa Clara County; Kavita Narayan, Deputy County Counsel for Santa Clara County; Toni Tullys, Director of Behavioral Health Services for Santa Clara County; Miguel Marquez, Chief Operating Officer for Santa Clara County; and Caroline Whistler, President and Co-Founder of Third Sector Capital Partners, Inc.

We welcome the chance to participate in this innovative partnership with Santa Clara County and Third Sector, and are honored to have the opportunity to provide services in a new area.