Behavioral health inside a health center.
Health centers took on behavioral health because their patients needed it. The operating model they inherited — per-visit PPS, UDS reporting, a population with every barrier to showing up — was not designed for it.
The warm handoff that cools in the lobby
Integrated care depends on same-day or next-day behavioral health access after a primary care visit. When the counselor's schedule cannot absorb the referral, the patient leaves with a phone number and most never call it.
Per-visit prospective payment
Under the FQHC PPS you are paid for the encounter that happens. A behavioral health no-show is the full encounter rate gone, and the sliding-fee patient who missed it is no closer to care.
UDS measures that depend on follow-up
Depression screening and follow-up plan, and the behavioral health service counts your grant renewal reads, are operationally a question of whether the patient came back for the next visit.
Patients with every barrier to showing up
Transportation, shift work, prepaid phones, limited English, no laptop. A portal-based engagement strategy reaches the patients who need it least.
A small behavioral health team inside a large organization
Two or three clinicians, no dedicated front desk, referrals arriving from every exam room. The coordination burden lands on people hired to provide care.
Growth that has to pay for itself
Expanding behavioral health capacity is easy to justify clinically and hard to justify financially when a fifth of the new capacity sits empty. Fill the chairs you have first.
Where Mend fits in a health center.
Mend is not an EHR. It runs alongside yours and works the space between the schedule and the visit, so the behavioral health program fills and the primary care handoff sticks.
Turn the warm handoff into a booked visit before the patient leaves
Real-time self-scheduling from a text sent in the exam room, and automated waitlist fill so behavioral health cancellations become same-day openings for new referrals.
Explore AccessReach patients who will never activate a portal
Text and email confirmations, digital intake and consent, screeners (PHQ-9, GAD-7) and insurance capture with no app and no login — in the patient's language, on the phone they have.
Explore EngageFollow-up without a follow-up team
An AI coordinator that predicts which visits are at risk, does the outreach and rescheduling, and escalates to your staff only when it should. Automation you dial up or hand back per workflow.
Explore CoordinateSee behavioral health performance inside the whole center
No-show rate, utilization, screener completion and follow-up by program, site and provider — ahead of UDS season, not after. Included with every Mend deployment.
Explore SignalSignal is included with every deployment. Adding Coordinate unlocks Mend's contractual 1:1 ROI guarantee. What Mend is, and what it isn't →
Straight answers.
The questions we hear from federally qualified health centers evaluating Mend, answered the way we answer them in the room.
Is Mend an EHR for FQHCs?
No. Mend is an operations platform that works alongside your EHR. It handles outreach, confirmation, intake, self-scheduling, waitlist fill, no-show prediction and follow-up for your behavioral health program, and writes back to the record. It integrates with Qualifacts (CareLogic, Credible), Netsmart, Streamline, Welligent, ContinuumCloud, Epic, NextGen, eClinicalWorks and Oracle Health.
How does Mend support integrated behavioral health warm handoffs?
Mend Access lets a primary care team send the patient a scheduling link in the exam room and book a behavioral health visit in real time, and automatically offers behavioral health cancellations to new referrals so same-day and next-day access is the norm rather than the exception.
Do our patients need a smartphone app or portal account?
No. Mend works over text and email with no download and no login, in the patient's preferred language. Patient adoption with Mend runs above 80%.
What no-show rate do health centers see with Mend?
Across Mend customers the average no-show rate is 7.4%, down from the 20%+ rates typical of behavioral health programs before Mend — a 63% reduction. Under per-visit prospective payment, each avoided no-show is a full encounter retained.
Does Mend help with UDS reporting?
Mend Signal tracks screener completion, follow-up and behavioral health utilization by program and provider so gaps are visible before reporting season. Mend does not replace your UDS submission tooling.
See it with your schedule, your EHR.
A demo walks through a FQHC’s actual week — where the no-shows are, what fills, what gets paid.