County ends arrangement with Be Well to run Mental Health and Wellness campus

The Orange County Health Care Agency ended its arrangement with the nonprofit running the Mental Health and Wellness campus in Orange in late August after an audit found deficiencies in how billing and training were handled.

But representatives for the treatment provider say many of this issues were fixed and claim they were blindsided by the decision to pull their funding.

Mind OC conducts outreach to the homeless community and operates various mental health and substance abuse treatment programs throughout Orange County under the name Be Well OC. Since 2021, it has been running the Mental Health and Welness Campus in partnership with the Orange County Health Care Agency.

The Orange County Board of Supervisors committed $16.6 million for the development of the Orange campus. Additional investments came from the County’s Medical Provider CalOptima and local hospitals whose officials anticipated that the facility would alleviate caseloads in their ERs.

An audit conducted in July cited issues with how staff training, credentials and quality management were being tracked at the Orange campus, according to documentation obtained by LAist via public records requests. It also raised concern over the potential for inaccuracies in billing for services.

“It had nothing to do with clinical care,” Mind OC chief executive Phillip Franks told the Daily Pilot Thursday. “It was the county monitoring our ability to do county level contract monitoring.”

The majority of the complaints in the audit specifically targeted crisis support programs at the campus like the crisis stabilization unit and emergency hotline. Until recently, those had been contracted to Exodus Recovery Inc., unlike the addiction and mental health treatment programs handled directly by Be Well.

Auditors found that calls would sometimes go unanswered while Exodus was running the hotline. Franks said the contractor also wasn’t doing a good job of referring people who called in to services, which meant it wasn’t helping as many people as it could have been.

Exodus announced plans to stop contracting for the county in March, and so Be Well stepped in to take over for the crisis support services it had been handling, Franks said. He said the nonprofit invested heavily into this effort, including restaffing the hotline with registered nurses available 24/7. He added that since then, the call center has been fielding 80 to 90 calls each day, and practically all of the programs at the Mental Health and Wellness campus are full with patients.

Franks said access to care at the campus improved dramatically after Be Well took over for Exodus. That’s why they were shocked when OCHCA told them it would be ending its arrangement with the nonprofit on Aug. 29.

“We had been planning to take on those services, hiring up our staff ...” Franks said. “It came as a complete and total surprise a couple Thursdays ago when we were given a termination notice.”

Around 100 staff at Be Well will have to be laid off as a result, Franks said.

“This decision is based on an ever-evolving public, private partnership model,” according to a joint statement from the OCHCA and Mind OC. “The HCA will manage the landscape of Medicaid programs at the site and partner with Exodus Recovery Inc. and HealthRight 360 to ensure continued high-quality psychiatric crisis and substance-use disorder services.”

Franks said he was concerned about Exodus stepping back into the picture, given his claim that many of the issues raised in the audit related to that contractor’s actions.

Meanwhile, OCHCA is still working with Be Well to open a second Mental Health and Wellness Campus at Great Park in Irvine. That deal has not been affected by developments at the Orange campus, Franks said.

The termination of Be Well’s involvement at the Orange campus came two days after the Newport Beach City Council decided to end the city’s $2.1-million contract with the nonprofit to run a street health program. Council members and residents offering public comments said they didn’t feel the program had achieved enough “street exits,” a term for moving homeless people into housing.

Franks explained that the nonprofit was focused on earning people’s trust and gradually encouraging them to get the support they needed. Unlike police, Be Well’s caseworkers don’t have the authority to force people out of encampments and out of public sight.