Mission
The Invictus Foundation is now focused on Phase 2 of our strategic and tactical plan; the Community Resource Leveraging component, which is providing behavioral health care services across the continuum of evaluation, diagnosis, treatment, ongoing community outreach services, education, training and research to our military, veterans, their families, families of the fallen, National Guard and Reservists. This is being accomplished through a network of community based practitioners providing services to our constituency without regard to their ability to pay. We have branded and trademarked this network as the Welcome Home Network. Phase 2 allows a more rapid deployment of behavioral health services out to our military, veterans and their families in the Puget Sound community, the state of Washington, the Pacific Northwest and the Western Region at large. The Seattle-Tacoma metropolis has one of the largest military/veterans communities in the Country.
The Welcome Home Network is a sustainable local, state-wide and regional network of behavioral health practitioners focused on meeting the behavioral health needs of our military community, veterans and their families by providing easily accessible and fully confidential behavioral health counseling services. To be a provider participant in the Welcome Home Network (WHN) we ask interested behavioral health providers to provide behavioral health services to military members, veterans and their families without regard to their ability to pay.
We’re approaching our provider supply inventory from a time continuum perspective that runs from the preferred to what each behavioral health specialist’s practice will allow. The operating model we have chosen to mirror that reality is to maintain a dynamic capacity inventory (DCI). Our DCI model allows behavioral health providers to give our military members, veterans and their families the time that their individual practices will allow them to give. The WHN’s goal is to make it easy for military members, veterans and their families to seek services and to make it easy for behavioral health professionals to provide behavioral health care to them.
Our Web site matches behavioral health providers to military members, veterans and their families seeking behavioral health services. Our scheduling system has the capacity to match based on geographic requirement and areas of need. We continually recruit new providers as we build partnerships with local/regional organizations that represent behavioral health professionals as well as those connected to the military. We also believe that by providing services that are separate from the military establishment, the WHN offers an essential option for these men and women who might otherwise fail to seek or receive appropriate services.
Finally, by making registration as a WHN provider an easy one-step online process, WHN offers caring behavioral health professionals an opportunity to provide their expertise in their office on their own schedule to our constituency. Providers in the WHN also offer consultation to employers, first-responders, schools, other veterans service organizations, in-service training to counseling centers and education and outreach services to inform the larger community on issues affecting the behavioral health of our military members, veterans and their families locally, state-wide and regionally.
The Welcome Home Network: A Primer for Behavioral Health Providers
What is the purpose of the Welcome Home Network®?
The Welcome Home Network (WHN) is being developed as a local, state-wide and regional network of behavioral health providers focused on meeting the behavioral health needs of military members, veterans and their families in the Seattle-Tacoma metropolis, Puget Sound Basin, Pacific Northwest and the Western Region at large. The Welcome Home Network will provide easily accessible and fully confidential behavioral health counseling services through our network of behavioral health providers on a sliding fee schedule up to and including pro bono services when and where necessary. To be a provider participant in the Welcome Home Network we will ask interested behavioral health providers to be willing to provide behavioral health services to military members, veterans and their families, hereafter referred to as the Community, on a sliding fee schedule up to and including pro bono services where necessary The Welcome Home Network’s goal is to make it easy for this Community to seek services and to make it easy for behavioral health providers to provide care to our Community.
The Invictus Foundation is the parent of the Welcome Home Network. The Invictus Foundation is a charitable, not-for-profit Behavioral Health Services Organization (BHSO). Our mission is to increase and improve behavioral health services for Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) Mild Brain Injury (MBI), Associated Brain Injury (ABI), Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), suicide prevention, depression, alcohol and substance abuse, domestic violence, relationship issues, military sexual trauma (MST), rehabilitation/aftercare (community integration) and pre/post deployment screening to this Country’s military, veterans, their families and families of the fallen. Critically important is that we will do so in a caring and collaborative community culture without regard to their ability to pay.
Has the need been established for the necessity of the Welcome Home Network®?
The communities surrounding Seattle-Tacoma have the highest per capita population of seriously disabled Iraq and Afghanistan veterans on the West Coast. The presence of thousands of seriously disabled veterans with co-morbid psychological wounds poses new and lasting challenges for the region as it learns to assimilate the generation of service members who bore the brunt of a decade of combat in the Middle East. The Department of Veterans Affairs has expanded to meet a growing demand for behavioral health treatment, yet it suffers from a tremendous backlog in caring for post-traumatic stress disorder. There is an urgent need to expand behavioral health care services for former service members to access immediately after they leave the military. It is a particularly vulnerable period of time because it can take months for veterans to figure out how to get what they need from the VA. The safety net for those veterans is not nearly what it needs to be for the men and women coming back. This is particularly true in the State of Washington which is listed as one of the ten states where veterans are medically underserved.
Will my malpractice insurance be affected by my joining the Welcome Home Network?
No. We have researched this extensively with the largest malpractice carrier in Washington, Physicians Insurance, and no one’s rates would be affected by joining the WHN.
Will there be training afforded to those behavioral health providers participating in the Welcome Home Networks around this specific Community?
Yes. Eastern Washington Area Health Education Centers (AHEC) has been awarded a Federal grant to provide just such training and it comes with CMEs and there is no cost to behavioral health providers who wish to participate in the training. However, there is no mandate to do so.
Is there a byproduct of this social advocacy that will be beneficial to my practice?
Yes. New referral development with the Invictus Foundation acting as the Medical Services Organization (MSO) to publicize, market, and fill the capacity of the Welcome Home Network at no charge to your practice.
Membership in the Welcome Home Network creates an instantaneous “book of goodwill” within the Community toward those behavioral health providers belonging to the Welcome Home Network and will be seen intuitively by the Community as an affinity group who has empathy for the behavioral health needs within their Community.
The principal issues confronting this Community are lack of access, lack of services and finally to a much smaller degree, lack of health care benefits. The first two have nothing to do with insurance coverage but rather lack of an understanding of referral sources, fragmentation within the referral sources themselves and the lack of a unified informatics platform specifically designed to help them find the resources.
The Invictus Foundation’s Welcome Home Network and its informatics platform have been designed to fill that void. The Invictus Foundation will provide the necessary AFR percentage (Administrative and Fund Raising) to publicize and market the availability of the Welcome Home Network to our military members, veterans, National Guard, Reservists and their families at no charge to providers participating in the Welcome Home Network.
The fusion of philanthropy and community outreach by behavioral health providers participating in the Welcome Home Network will create a large book of goodwill in the Community tethered to their intuitive understanding that Welcome Home Network participants is a group that is showing an affinity for their needs. That understanding will make those participating in the Welcome Home Networks the first choice of those in the Community seeking behavioral health care services.
Has the Welcome Home Network’s® informatics and analytics platform been built and is there a Website where we can go to view it?
Yes. The Welcome Home Network’s® informatics and analytics platform is fully operational. The Welcome Home Network’s® informatics and analytics platform creates what has been heretofore lacking between the various military and veteran’s affairs command structures and their embedded behavioral health providers and community-based behavioral health providers; a permeable informatics and analytics membrane.
The Welcome Home Network’s informatics and analytics platform will push and pull information to resource groups to provide equilibrium to the supply and demand logistical chain. We will also market and publicize to the military and veterans community that there is a group of behavioral health providers who have an affinity for and an awareness that they are a Community that is being medically underserved in the area of behavioral health services and have committed themselves to take action to address the issue on a philanthropic basis when and where the need exists.
The Welcome Home Network’s® informatics and analytics platform will provide cloud-based mobile and web applications which will help military members, veterans and their families engage critical behavioral health services.
What will be the payer mix?
TriWest, private insurance, Medicare, Medicaid and pro bono services
What will be the case mix?
Case mix will consist of active duty military, veterans, National Guard, Reservists, their families and families of the fallen.
What will be the service mix?
Predominantly individual and family therapy services
Will the Welcome Home Network® treat only those within this Community?
No. There are other groups particularly paramilitary ones such as public safety officers (police, fire, EMT, etc.) that have an affinity with this Community. We will also intake those in the community-at-large who are looking for a referral source. However, we will reserve the right to tier referral requests into the Welcome Home Network® so that capacity is filled first by members of the Community that the Invictus Foundation has made its mission to serve.
Why would an active duty military member or members of their family choose to seek care off base?
The answer is two-fold. First, the military uses a tiered system of access to care which allows them to better manage capacity. It is no secret that DOD and the VA have encountered systemic failure in the provision of behavioral health services to those that it is contracted to do so and demand has far exceeded their resources. The cascading impact of that fact has meant that military members, veterans and their families are being woefully underserved in this area.
Next, there is the stigma factor. Active duty military do not believe that there is an impermeable membrane between the medical function within the military and the command and control function on the military bases where they serve despite HIPPA. Since perception is nine tenths of reality, their reality is that it will become known to the command and control structure that they are seeking behavioral health care services and it will flat line their military careers.
How do I communicate my interest in participating in the Welcome Home Network®?
By filling out our online Call to Action form which can be found under Networks on our Home Page.
Should I have general questions about the Welcome Home Network® program is there a contact individual and contact number I can call?
Yes. Please email or call Peter J Whalen, the CEO of the Invictus Foundation, at 425-228-0419 or toll-free at 1-855-544-PTSD (7873).
Provider Informatics & Analytics
To recognize the necessity of maintaining the uniformity and consistency of each behavioral health providers scheduling system and the relational databases that are interrelated with that core function we have mapped out the following standard operating procedure (SOP) for new referral development from the Welcome Home Network (WHN). Once the military member, veteran or family member matches with a provider through the WHN’s scheduling system it will be the responsibility of each provider to onboard them into their own scheduling system for future appointments.
We have put in place metrics on the backend of the WHN scheduling system so that we will be able to provide behavioral health providers who sign up for the WHN the following quarterly data sets:
- The number of times a potential referral source clicked on a provider’s name
- The number of pro bono hours allocated within the WHN in aggregate and by individual provider by county and by zip code
- The number of “covered benefit” referrals made within the WHN in aggregate, by individual provider, by county and by zip code
The goal is to track closely the value-add that accrues to those behavioral health providers who join the WHN. The Invictus Foundation will function as a no cost Medical Services Organization (MSO) on your behalf channeling military members, veterans and their families into the WHN network. By program design and in operating reality the WHN will mimic an Exclusive Provider Organization (EPO) that is comprised of “military/veteran friendly” behavioral health providers.
Participate in Training
For Behavioral Health Providers
The Invictus Foundation is committed to help continue your education. Our provider training portal is meant to be a collaborative effort with our provider base. Our goals and objectives are clear. The first is to pool great resources for you to browse on topics such as military culture, deployment and reintegration, behavioral health, and military families and children. The second is to have providers reciprocate by sharing materials with us that you’ve found useful so that we can promote these on our site. Lastly, we want to help obtain continuing education units (CEUs) for your license.
Our focus will be on distilling the enormous amount of information that exists in the public domain about these subject matters into useful informatics packets that will provide you a better understanding of the issues facing our military members, veterans and their families. Our hope is that by better understanding their issues you will want to volunteer your professional skills to help them improve their coping skills in dealing with these issues.
In return for providing this training and informatics platform we will ask only that you provide us with your email address so that we can build a specific data base of behavioral health providers that will allow us an opportunity to continue to grow our Welcome Home Network. We will provide you with an option to opt out of receiving emails from us at any point in time you so desire.
We have chosen to begin the arc of our progress toward reaching these goals and objectives by partnering with QPR, Inc. to provide behavioral health providers training which will yield CME credits. You can learn more about QPR’s training programs by clicking on this link; http://www.qprinstitute.com You can read more about our partnership by clicking on this link; http://prn.to/18brHbN For Washington State behavioral health providers their suicide prevention training is particularly beneficial inasmuch that as of January 1st, 2014 suicide prevention training is mandated by the State.
There are multiple benefits for registering to receive training through the Invictus Foundation’s provider portal:
- QPR will “gift back” 10% of the revenue stream coming to them through the Invictus Foundation’s provider portal to help us to continue to grow our Welcome Home Network (WHN).
- You will receive CME credits from QPR for completing their training
- Providers signing up for the WHN will receive new referral development services from the Invictus Foundation at no cost to your practice.
- To take advantage of this 10% gift back provision from QPR to the Invictus Foundation and our new referral development services for those signing up for the WHN please email us with Invictus/QPR in the subject line and indicate in the body of your message that you would like to learn more about this promotion.
Become a WHN Provider
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