Western Slope lawmakers tour new Vail Health mental health facility

Colorado Speaker of the House Julie McCluskie, Sen. Dylan Roberts and Rep. Meghan Lukens on Monday toured the Wiegers Mental Health Clinic and the Precourt Healing Center in Edwards.

The Western Slope lawmakers were shown through the Precourt Healing Center, which is currently under construction. The tour began in the ambulance bay and worked through each subsequent room a patient will experience: intake, the kitchen, the pharmacy, the gym, the outdoors space, a patient room, group and art therapy rooms, the seclusion room, and visitors’ rooms.

Construction on the Precourt Healing Center is due to be completed in the coming months, and the facility is set to open in mid-May 2025. The facility will have three floors and 28 beds, all in single-occupancy rooms with individual bathrooms.

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The first floor of the facility will be devoted to intake, and the second and third floors to inpatient housing and living areas.

Though the second floor is currently designated for adolescent care and the third floor for adults, the facility also can “flex” rooms across units, trading out adult or adolescent capacity for the other seven beds at a time as needed. While staff-to-patient ratios are different for adults versus adolescents, hiring for the new facility will operate off the most conservative measure, said Casey Wolfington, the community behavioral health director at Vail Health.

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The Precourt Healing Center will have several unique features, aimed to promote patient-first care.

Each inpatient floor has two mirrored halves, with seven beds on each side. Most of the time, the floor will be open for patients to move about as they please. A staff-only area runs down the middle of each floor so that even if areas are closed off for patients, the central location of the staff hub enables staff to flow from one side to the other of the facility.

Once open, the center will accept patients from all over the region, with treatment not limited to Eagle County or Colorado residents. Health care providers will be able to move between inpatient and outpatient facilities to follow their patients.

“Personally, when I would have patients that would go to an inpatient hospital, the first thing they would say is, ‘Oh, it’s a lot worse in here than I was out there, so I just need to say whatever I need to say to get out,'” Wolfington said. “We don’t want a patient to feel like they have to leave. We don’t want to rush recovery.”

Both floors of the inpatient facility are set up with an open concept.

“Oftentimes, when people think of inpatient facility, they think of one small room, with a lot of chairs and then a TV in the corner, and that’s all people do all day,” Wolfington said. “We wanted patients to have a lot of individual opportunities to select where they would be, how to engage in care, making sure they would feel comfortable.”

There is an outdoor engagement space on each inpatient floor that will provide patients with the opportunity to spend time in the fresh air in all seasons, with a tent for shade in summer and snowmelt capabilities in winter.

Windows, individual bathrooms, and accommodating beds

“Usually, what is said is that for safety, you can’t really have rooms that exude comfort, and I think that we’ve completely changed that,” Wolfington said. 

The Precourt Healing Center will be the second facility in the United States to use Oxevision, an infrared scanner made by the company Oxehealth that provides a heat footprint of the patient, as well as their live pulse and respiration rates, a useful way to avoid waking patients when facility staff need to check on them at night. 

The facility has one seclusion room per floor, which is required in the state for behavioral health facilities, but Wolfington said the hope is never to use the space for that purpose.

“We’re actually hoping that if we can create a robust enough plan, and it can be utilized, we can demonstrate to the BHA (Behavioral Health Administration) that maybe seclusion rooms are actually not necessary,” Wolfington said.

Patients will receive between seven and nine hours of therapeutic support per day during their stay at the Precourt Healing Center, with therapies ranging from art to exercise to traditional talk therapy and beyond. 

The alternative therapy rooms, like the art room, are located on the same floor as the patients’ rooms, making it easier for patients to access therapy if the need arises at unscheduled times. 

The kitchen will serve healthy, nutritious meals, and there will be an on-site gym for patients to exercise regularly, with staff prepared to teach patients how to exercise. These features, in particular, are priorities of Chris Lindley, Vail Health Behavioral Health’s executive director.

The visiting rooms — for families, legal representation and others — are located outside of patients’ living quarters. Visiting hours will be on a flexible schedule to fit the busy schedules of families in mountain communities.

Innovation at the Wieger Mental Health Clinic

The Precourt Healing Center is not the only change coming for Vail Health Behavioral Health. The Wieger Mental Health Clinic will also be seeing some renovations and expansion soon.

While the clinic currently resides in one block of a larger building in Edwards, the clinic will soon take over the rest of the building to create nine additional clinical office spaces. At the moment, the behavioral health team is out of offices entirely.

The Vail Health Behavioral Health Innovation Center and the behavioral health research team will also soon be housed in the building with the clinic. The research team has already begun studying the effect of hyperthermia treatment for depression, and will soon be adding psilocybin studies.

Financing and staffing Vail Health Behavioral Health’s new and expanded facilities

The Vail Health Behavioral Health team is “trying to create a new model for the delivery of care and the financing of it,” Will Cook, CEO of Vail Health, told the visiting lawmakers on Monday.

All-in, the Precourt Healing Center is looking to hire 178 employees.

McCluskie asked about how Vail Health would finance the project while avoiding creating new affordability barriers for patients.

“There’s a lot of waste in the system when you don’t have the adequate investment in the up-front — what I refer to as primary care — preventative care that gets paid for in the least effective, most expensive way, which is an emergency department or an inpatient setting,” Cook said.

Rather than neglecting potential patients’ mental health until they rack up a $25,000 bill in the emergency room, Vail Health is looking to redistribute the dollars into places where they are more effective, like schools and primary care physicians, Cook said.

Vail Health has negotiated with private insurance companies to ensure private health care payment parity, and the behavioral health facilities will also accept Medicare and Medicaid.

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Obtaining such a large volume of staff involves ensuring staff members have places to live, and Cook emphasized the need for building housing, like Fox Hollow, including participating in public-private partnerships.

Maintaining current staff is another piece of the puzzle. Health care providers often go into jobs at community mental health centers expecting to leave, Wolfington said, a trend she has worked to put a stop to at Vail Health Behavioral Health.

“We have had one provider leave since we began in 2020,” Wolfington said. “I think that a lot of the community mental health centers lose their providers because they give them increasingly high caseloads, put them in acute situations that they’re not prepared for with their training, and don’t give them the support, and so our goal is to give providers a way to see their patients and not have to go to private practice in order to pay their bills.”