Healthy at Home

Providing top-quality healthcare to incarcerated people is the core of YesCare’s mission, but just as important is making sure that those patients continue to receive care once they return to their communities. Continuity of care, particularly for addiction and mental health issues, is an important factor in making sure people do not reoffend and are able to maintain healthy, productive lives outside the criminal justice system. 

Steve Tomlin, YesCare’s Chief Strategic Innovation Officer, designed the company’s reentry program, fostering and leveraging relationships with community partners, social services networks and healthcare providers to make sure vulnerable individuals do not experience interruptions in treatment. This is particularly important for people with chronic conditions such as diabetes, Hepatitis C or HIV, and people who are receiving medication-assisted treatment (MAT) for opioid addiction, where consistent, regular care is crucial for success and best health outcomes.

The key to successful reentry, Tomlin says, is community. “We do comprehensive reentry planning. We have a Corrections to Community workbook that we give to them, which is a step-by-step how-to guide. ‘Here's how to find a primary care physician,’ for example. Many of these individuals don’t have a script for things that we would consider ‘normal.’ Many are raised in family systems of multi-generational incarceration. For individuals who grew up going to visit parents or grandparents in jail or prison, their concept of what we may consider ‘societal norms’ might be very different.”   

A healthy living situation supports overall health and wellness, and so a significant number of the services included in YesCare’s reentry programs are not specifically healthcare-focused. “We try to give them as many tools as we can to support their physical and mental health, and that includes general life skills. Reentry is a unique cross-section of public health and public safety,” Tomlin says. 

“If they’re on MAT for treatment of opioid use disorder, we’ll connect them with bridge programs to make sure that treatment isn’t interrupted. But it also might include help with affordable housing, or connecting them to faith-based groups, even help finding workplace-appropriate clothing. What do they need to be able to stay out? Can we put them into some type of sober or supportive living environment? Can we put them into transitional housing with continued counseling and access to medications, and maybe some job skills or training? We try to identify what they will need and set up the referrals.”  

A unique element of YesCare’s reentry program is its wide-ranging online portal. It's sorted by region or city,  then broken down into categories of service on an easily searchable map. “They put in, ‘Okay, I need counseling, and this is where my home is,’ and it’ll pop up the service providers in their area.” The next step, Tomlin says, will be to make the map qualitative. “We’re trying to make it more like a Yelp search,” he says. “We’re trying to figure out which groups are the best at working with the criminal justice population. Then we’ll give those providers a gold star so that when you do a search, the preferred providers pop up to the top.”  

YesCare’s reentry efforts have been so successful that the company now includes a robust reentry program as part of its bidding process for new contracts. “The latest model that we have would be what we've just done in Louisville, Kentucky,” Tomlin says. “I, as the clinical representative, and one of our business development officers will go into a prospective market and work with the local lobbyist and local nonprofits and care teams. We develop that reentry support network on the front end so we can include all of those community partnerships as part of our bid to provide comprehensive care.”  

For more information on YesCare, please visit: https://www.yescarecorp.com/