Becker's Healthcare Behavioral Health
Sep 27, 2026 · 24 min · 9 segments
In this episode, Colin LeClair, CEO of Connections Health Solutions, joins the podcast to discuss the role of artificial intelligence in behavioral healthcare and the organization’s new AI…
Colin LeClairGuestElla RuderHost
One is administrative simplification, making the administration of healthcare much simpler, more efficient, or eliminating it altogether.
There's care augmentation, which is supporting clinicians to do the work that they do, practice at the top of their license and not spend, you know, more time than is necessary doing that administrative work and helping with clinical decision making.
There's synthetic and computational biology, which is not something that we're in need of yet.
But I think as we move more toward precision psychiatry, there may be opportunity for us there as those solutions and tools reach more of a Medicaid population.
And these are, by the way, categories that were defined really elegantly by Eric Larson.
and we subscribe to this kind of framework, we are focused almost exclusively on administrative simplification.
There's an enormous amount of administrivia in behavioral health that wastes up to about 40% on average of our clinicians' time.
Each discipline has a different constraint, a different burden in terms of administration.
But on average, on a weighted average basis, our clinicians... spend about 40% of the time just moving paper, chasing paper, chasing data.
And then that problem is exacerbated in an emergency medicine environment when a patient arrives at your door.
They may not be a great historian and be able to tell you succinctly or accurately what their medical history looks like and you need to have really good clean data at your fingertips the moment that patient arrives that's just not available and so you're starting treatment blind.
So eliminating all the administration required to collect that collateral, collect that data, develop a more fulsome picture of the patient and start a really good care plan is absolutely critical.
So that's our first priority, eliminating the administration, giving our team back more time to work with the patient directly, spend less time chasing paper and looking through their EHR.
We are also looking at care augmentation opportunities, but we're being very, very cautious.
The data on the efficacy of these tools, the accuracy of these tools is getting better and better and demonstrating, you know, pretty high accuracy rates, if you will, in terms of supporting diagnosis and supporting development of treatment plans.
But more than just human in a loop, we want human at the helm and supported by AI research and insight.
One is administrative simplification, making the administration of healthcare much simpler, more efficient, or eliminating it altogether.
There's care augmentation, which is supporting clinicians to do the work that they do, practice at the top of their license and not spend, you know, more time than is necessary doing that administrative work and helping with clinical decision making.
There's synthetic and computational biology, which is not something that we're in need of yet.
But I think as we move more toward precision psychiatry, there may be opportunity for us there as those solutions and tools reach more of a Medicaid population.
And these are, by the way, categories that were defined really elegantly by Eric Larson.
and we subscribe to this kind of framework, we are focused almost exclusively on administrative simplification.
There's an enormous amount of administrivia in behavioral health that wastes up to about 40% on average of our clinicians' time.
Each discipline has a different constraint, a different burden in terms of administration.
But on average, on a weighted average basis, our clinicians... spend about 40% of the time just moving paper, chasing paper, chasing data.
And then that problem is exacerbated in an emergency medicine environment when a patient arrives at your door.
They may not be a great historian and be able to tell you succinctly or accurately what their medical history looks like and you need to have really good clean data at your fingertips the moment that patient arrives that's just not available and so you're starting treatment blind.
So eliminating all the administration required to collect that collateral, collect that data, develop a more fulsome picture of the patient and start a really good care plan is absolutely critical.
So that's our first priority, eliminating the administration, giving our team back more time to work with the patient directly, spend less time chasing paper and looking through their EHR.
We are also looking at care augmentation opportunities, but we're being very, very cautious.
The data on the efficacy of these tools, the accuracy of these tools is getting better and better and demonstrating, you know, pretty high accuracy rates, if you will, in terms of supporting diagnosis and supporting development of treatment plans.
But more than just human in a loop, we want human at the helm and supported by AI research and insight.
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