Outpatient and Residential Care Associates
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ORCA Behavioral Health
Outpatient & Residential Care Associates in Behavioral Health
“A Socially Responsible Company with a Dignified Mission - To provide mentally disabled, disenfranchised, homeless seniors, and vulnerable young girls with access to adequate treatment and sheltering. Each approach is predicated on a successful model and implemented with our innovation. We have a responsibility to each patient and within our company.”
Better than any Non-Profit or For-Profit model known, we believe in zeroing out the profit and re-investing in our patients and infrastructure year after year
We cannot be everything to everybody so we have to synergize our resources with 17 rural Northern California Counties to achieve an innovative complementary ecosystem. One project, Shanti Senior Village, is solely for geriatric homeless seniors and seniors with mental health issues.
2022 CA Governor Gavin Newsom earmarked $2.1B to create a safety net for
those most vulnerable; he supported public private partnerships for housing and
“Care Not Cash” to help the homeless with supportive housing, drug treatment
and help from behavioral health specialists
The Problem
There is a stealthy yet accelerating problem in our public mental health care safety
net for the homeless geriatric population. These individuals spend time under
bridges and tent cities with a poor chance of EVER breaking this cycle due to the
intrinsic limitations of our mental health care systems.
This invisible (quickly becoming not so invisible) problem, prevalent across streets
in California is Geropsychiatric (relating to mentally ill seniors) Homelessness. In
2019, the homeless population in California was 162,000 and in Sacramento
County specifically, it was estimated to be between 10,000 and 11,000 individuals. In
2022, that Sacramento County statistic as much as doubled, with the estimate now
falling between 16,500 and 20,000 people. Advocates believe the homeless
population in California could easily be around 250,000 after taking into account the
many undercounted homeless geropsychiatric seniors living in rural areas in the
northern part of the state.
Why is this OUR problem?
The homeless geropsychiatric population is flooding our emergency rooms and coming in for physical crises as a result of neglected routine diabetic care/high blood pressure/physical deterioration. This neglect is causing the medical structure to get inundated and accelerate all healthcare costs. We are bothered when seeing the homeless and are relieved after passing their tent cities. Instead of acting on this unsettling issue, we are letting the homeless population in the US skyrocket. However, in Northern California, there is a synergistic and innovative approach that ORCA will pursue to support the Northern California Homeless and Geropsych disabled populations.Solution Projects
Premier Independence
$2.25m contract with Tehama County to run medicare/medical/CalAIMS adult outpatient psychiatry and crisis stabilization unit.
Shanti Senior Village
Writing for a $12-15m State CCE grant for Homeless Geriatric Patients with Mental Illness. This project will demonstrate self sustainability in a year.
Facility
A 44,000 square foot former VA clinic in Redding within Shasta County,
California. The facility is tucked amongst the picturesque Sacramento River and is
close to hospitals and specialty clinics. It is to be fitted with solar panels and water
condensers that would allow for 24-hour use, minimizing energy/carbon footprint
and saving $30,000/month in utilities. It will also include a uniquely planned
indoor/outdoor green space to encourage a sense of community. This ideal
Northern California location will serve residents from the 17 rural collar counties
by mutually synergizing ORCA’s and the counties’ health care resources.
The 17 Counties – Alpine, Amador, Butte, Colusa, Del Norte, Glenn, Humboldt,
Lake, Lassen, Mendocino, Modoc, Plumas, Shasta, Sierra, Siskiyou, Tehama,
Trinity
Services
We are addressing the needs of homeless seniors with mental illness and
comorbid medical conditions. Additionally, we are removing seniors at
unnecessarily higher levels of care. We are working to leverage existing services creating more integrated service nets within 17 rural counties as prioritized in the CCE grant and California Health Foundation.
Maximizing success by offering in-house step-
down services with whole person
care:
Geropsychiatric PHF (separate PACE grant)
This service will accept referrals from the 17 counties for individuals on either involuntary holds/ voluntary admissions. The service will provide quality senior only acute psychiatric care stabilization.
Recuperative Geropsychiatric Residential Treatment
45 day residential services for patients unable to return to their housing but who are not in need of psychiatric care. The recuperative residential services will prepare patients for semi-independent living and will coordinate appropriate transitions
Recuperative Geropsychiatric Residential Treatment with Embedded Primary Care
Semi-independent living units for whole person care which will provide case
management and medical assistance services. Unlike traditional transitional
housing units, ORCA’s hub will support clients who are bifurcating into a) more
independent situations e.g. aging in place housing after removal from nursing
homes b) a physical decline which may eventually require assisted living or skilled
nursing but can judiciously be re-evaluated. The length of stay will be between 45
days and 18 months.
The senior village will ease waitlisted permanent/supportive housing in the 17
counties by reciprocal patient transfer via ORCA’s and the counties’ synergistic
safety nets. Our Residential Treatment of 1-18 months allows seamless transition
to occur instead of the tattered net of hotels, homeless shelters and emergency
financial patches.
Social Detox and Rehabilitation Services
45 day stay program that will mutually leverage ORCA’s and the counties’ infrastructure to form a sobriety net.
Facility Service Innovations
Most patients’ complex solutions are difficult to
initially facilitate in the framework of traditional care settings as well as rural care
settings. Our innovative solutions include
A) employing CAT (Cognitive Adaptive
Training) to shift appropriate nursing home patients to lower levels of care. This is
a direct result of the successful employment of the “Money Follows The Person”
program. CAT was successfully created and rolled out by the University of Texas’s
Dawn Velligan, PhD and Natalie Maples, PhD. It was implemented in rural regions
around San Antonio, saving over $30m in 5 years to provide mentally ill with
whole person care.
B) B) While telepsychiatry is not a novel practice, we innovated
and successfully demonstrated “on-demand” expansion/contraction of quality
telepsychiatry providers for 5 years at Tehama County. Many patients indicated
that this was some of the best care they had received in many years; prior to us,
many providers left after 18 months with resulting suboptimal patient-care. We
solved the most vexing rural healthcare practicality.
Other Projects
Designing self sufficiency via solar panels and water condensers
(https://www.source.co/how-hydropanels-work/)
Plans to expand Section 8 / low income housing on our ”own dime” with Boxabl
housing (https://www.boxabl.com/). We instill empowerment to our patients so
we demonstrate sustainability and long term plans for them as well as for our
company.
Sustainable Farming: We must work to encourage patients to grow and garden
their own food when practical. We acknowledge that this is not within reach of all
of our patients year round but we strongly identify with these practices.
All India Movement for Seva (AIM for Seva) is a pan-Indian, non-profit registered charitable trust, founded in 2000. Their mission is to empower the children of rural India through value-based education in the form of Chatralayams (Free Student Hostels) and schools.
The Chatralayam Project
Many children in rural India struggle to access quality education as they have to travel long distances just to get to a school. AIM for SEVA is building student hostels to allow students to attend nearby schools. The student hostels include services such as tutoring, fortified food, yoga, music, and other extracurricular activities. There are 104 hostels consisting of all boys’ and all girls’ facilities across 16 states in India.
Our Involvement
ORCA Behavioral Health family members currently support the all girls hostel in Pedda Kottala Village, Nandyal, Andhra Pradesh at approximately $40,000/year and would like to start allocating 5% of ORCA non-maintenance revenue towards this and the remaining 95% to building Sec 8/low income housing.