by John Minahan, CEO of Mindful Health Solutions
When a psychiatrist or psychiatric nurse practitioner joins Mindful Health Solutions, they join for many reasons. Culture and quality of life are two reasons, but the main reason we constantly hear about is their ability to learn and practice interventional psychiatry at Mindful Health Solutions. They want to join a company that is forward-thinking about new and innovative treatments, and that helps teach them to apply such treatments.
Mindful Health Solutions’ Training Program
Education is an investment, and at Mindful Health Solutions, we are making an investment in each new provider. When a provider is hired, they begin our month-long provider training experience. During their first month, they spend only about 20 hours seeing patients, while the other 140 hours are spent training and onboarding. Overall, almost 90% of their first month is spent training. The schedules during the four weeks of training are as follows:
Week 1
The first week of training consists of onboarding in addition to learning the EMR and other systems and processes specific to Mindful Health Solutions.
Week 2
During the second week, providers begin the cognitive training course where we cover the depression care pathway and measurement-based care. By the end of week two, they have begun to cover how to use transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), esketamine, and electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) as interventional psychiatry treatments. However, they do not get any hands-on experience yet.
Week 3
At the start of the third week, we fly all new providers to our Training Experience Center in Mission Viejo, California. There, providers spend the full week training with our team of TMS experts. They are also shown the basics of esketamine.
When there, providers meet and spend time with our Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Toby Marton. I also fly in to discuss the direction of the practice and answer questions. However, most of the week is hands-on training with TMS. The Chief Financial Officer, Ryan Jessop, and I spend most of our time in TMS chairs as volunteers for providers.
Week 4
For the fourth week, we fly the providers to existing clinics. At these clinics, they shadow our group of highly trained providers while they are providing actual TMS treatments on our patients.
Training is for everyone
It’s important to note that even though a portion of our practice is telemedicine, all new providers, whether in-clinic or remote, go through the same intensive training. We believe education is important, and we want all new providers to receive the same level of education. This training also works at building comradery as well as both personal and professional relationships that we hope will last a lifetime.
Before our Mission Viejo Training Center opened, we already had over 50 providers in our network. Now, we have over 100. Because of this, many of our existing providers have not had the opportunity to experience the new training program. Starting in February 2023, our existing providers who may want to brush up on the newest methods and processes will have a bi-monthly opportunity to join in on this training.
However, even by allowing our existing providers to join alongside new providers, we still expect to have some room for more to join in. Since we have the capacity to train up to 15 providers at a time, we are going to open our training center to psychiatrists in our community or in larger health systems. They will have an opportunity to gain CE credit and become well-trained in TMS. This program will be led by Dr. Karl Lanocha. Dr. Lanocha has been with Mindful Health Solutions since its beginning and is an expert in the field of interventional psychiatry.
We are excited to share more about these training opportunities in the future and look forward to making an impact in our community as well as in the fight against treatment-resistant depression.
