HJAR May/Jun 2024

DIALOGUE Medicaid, but it's a very poor state. Part of our success — I caught on pretty early in the early ‘80s — is we went to places that have documented poverty. I could almost show you on a heat map, if you go to Southern and Southeastern Woodruff County, Northern Monroe County, and some of Prairie County, you're not going to find anybody any poorer however you do the studies. It’s the same in Kentucky. We look at those counties and see if it's where the real need is because the government wants you to document everything, and that's great because we document it. We've almost been blessed with this load of pov- erty because there's a lot of poverty. Now, in Arkansas, everybody knows that. It’s not a secret. We have a lot of people from our part of the state that have moved to Northwest Arkansas. I have two sons up there, and they love it. Northwest is booming, so we have some operations going on in the Northwest, but not near as big as the eastern side. We keep our main focus on Eastern Arkansas, Northern Mississippi, and Southwestern Kentucky. We've turned down a few spots that have proposed we come and said that's sort of out of our territory. Editor What makes a good practitioner in a rural area that has high poverty? Collier In our area, they definitely need to be efficient and caring. And even though they see poverty, they can't get bogged down with it. What I'm referring to there is that they have to keep their clinic going even though they have somebody in there with a drug issue. And they've got to have the resources to take care of that patient to keep moving on to see the next patient. So, management of their clinic, efficiency of their practice, but at the same time, caring about what happens to that person. We might have somebody come in a clinic where we do a lot of mental health and drug screens on them for the week, and they might fail a drug screen. Well, you can't just show your frustration and cause a scene. I've seen that. We encourage our providers to say, "You didn't pass your drug screen, but you're going to have to go meet with our counselor and I'll see you next week. You've got to do better." That's what I mean. You have to take those disappoint- ments but keep your clinic and the other patients in mind. Editor You seem to be incorporating behavioral health into your clinics earlier than a lot of organizations have. What prompted that? How do you do it? How can you do it while other groups are not? Collier We are very aggressive. A few years ago, when President Trump was still in office and there was a series of grants that went out several years ago because of the substance abuse problem and how many people that we were losing from drug overdoses — and we still are — we did the research on it and decided to apply for this grant. We just happened to have the right people at the right time and decided to expand into substance abuse and behavioral “Just because we're in a rural area, it doesn't mean that we haven't had the training. We really push for our leaders, especially, and our providers, to have excellent training. We have a PhD psychologist, a psychiatrist, a lot of counselors, nurse practitioners, and a few doctors who do substance abuse treatment. … Our goal is to integrate substance abuse, behavioral health, and primary care.” 12 MAY / JUN 2024 I  HEALTHCARE JOURNAL OF ARKANSAS