By Conrad Easterday, Editor
conrad@washitavalleyweekly.com

When Ty Pool was hired as vice president of Physician Services & Clinics at Grady Memorial Hospital in July 2021, one of the things physicians consistently asked for was more and better access to mental health care for their patients.
If the hospital and Five Oaks Family Medical Clinic are awarded a $150,000 annual grant, physicians will get their wish, Pool said.
The grant would provide just enough money to get a mental health program off the ground at Five Oaks and revenue from the services themselves will help keep the program operating. Donations could have a significant impact as well, Pool said.
Mental health services provided by counselors and psychiatrists are expensive because they consume so much time ­— something primary care physicians don’t have, he explained. Physicians have a few options for obtaining a psychiatric referral. The easiest is to send the patient to a cash-basis provider.
“People around here just can’t afford that,” Pool said.
A better option, though not an easy one, is the kind of program that Five Oaks will provide. It will rely on a part-time psychiatrist with an Oklahoma license who performs tele-medicine funded by a mix of grants, revenue and donations.
The first grant, which Pool believes stands a good chance of approval, would come from the Oklahoma Opioid Abatement Board, which oversees the disbursement of funds the state received from opioid lawsuit settlements, primarily the Purdue Pharma lawsuit. The company was found to have used aggressive and deceptive marketing of opioids such as Oxycontin.
The board is currently reviewing 101 applications for grants, all of which seek to address the opioid crisis in some fashion. Grady Memorial’s application stresses the funds for its program will be used to treat substance abusers. Mental health disorders and substance abuse often go hand in hand, making treatment complex.
“I could treat a patient for anxiety, let’s use that one,” Pool said. “We find because of their anxiety they use this substance here to control it, and they’ve used it for a long time. Now you’ve got co-occuring disorders, and we have to address it to uncover the drivers of that anxiety, and because they’re using the substance you can’t just focus on one. You have to do both.”
The opioid abatement grant isn’t the only grant opportunity the hospital is pursuing. Another grant would provide $750,000, but the pool of applicants is larger and the number of grant awards is fewer. Pool is willing to start small. The hospital’s strategic plan doesn’t require the clinic to start off with a bang.
“Psychiatry is very hard to find in our area,” Pool said. “Mental health and substance abuse services are very difficult to support on their own, but we’re supposed to serve our community, so if it starts small, and we have to grow it over time, then that’s what we have to do, at least start right. This (grant) is a funding start.”
Before coming to Chickasha, Pool helped grow a federally qualified health center from one provider to 10, five of whom were mental health or substance abuse disorder providers.
“I started with just a medical practice very similar to how we have here, and we were able to grow that, and I just saw the positive benefits that it had on my primary care (providers) and how the were able to have somebody that they could refer patients to and actually get into the right arena of treatment,” he said.
Counselors at other mental health clinics in the area will eventually be able to refer patients to a psychiatrist at Five Oaks.
“They all need the same thing,” Pool said. “They all need that help from a psychiatrist — that level of medicine. We want to get to that too, but we’ve got to be able to start and help our current patient base before we can really grow the program.”
Even though the hospital has space available, Grady Memorial selected its Five Oaks clinic for the program because regulations governing rural health clinics provide financial advantages over hospitals, meaning they can stretch the funds from grants farther.
“Under the hospital’s roof things are not as financially advantageous,” Pool said.
The clinic will have a tele-medicine psychiatrist and support staff, including a care manager. Current staff will assist as well.
Pool hopes that potential donors will read this story and come forward with enough funding to accelerate and expand services beyond its initial grant funding of $150,000 a year for five years.