EDWARDS — In the last week of 2024, six residents suffering a mental health crisis in the Eagle River Valley had to be transported to metro Denver for treatment. 

“The need is here. That just shows how great it would be for us to have this for our community,” said Chris Lindley, who has led a nearly five-year effort to improve mental health in Colorado’s high country. 

Lindley, officially the chief population health officer for Vail Health’s nascent behavior health mission, is showing off a new inpatient mental health crisis center in the middle of a valley where suicide ranks among the leading causes of death. 

The 28-bed Precourt Healing Center is the culmination of a nearly $200 million community effort to deliver mental health services to struggling residents. The facility was built specifically for psychiatric care, a break from the traditional model, which typically involves making minor tweaks to an existing physical care hospital. And Precourt is part of a mental health campus, with outpatient care and a host of services that not only help people weather a crisis, but set them on a new path toward physical and mental stability. 

That continuation of mental health care “is a huge problem we have today and it’s a problem all over the country,” Lindley said, describing how people can get stabilized at a psychiatric facility but then they are sent home without much follow-up. “We are going to be with them from the day they walk out of here. It’s actually the most dangerous time for anybody, those days after discharge. That’s when the most completed suicides actually happen.”

Breaking the mold of dated — and not always successful — mental health care begins in the 48,000-square-foot Precourt Healing Center. There are 28 rooms, with 14 for adults on one floor and 14 for adolescents on another. 

The facility is big enough for not just Eagle County, but all of Colorado’s central mountain communities. 

“We are going to be a resource for the entire state of Colorado,” Lindley said. 

Each room is private, with its own bathroom. The thick-paned windows are large, filling the floors with sunlight. The public lobby on the ground level for families has muted colors, stone trim and comfortable couches, not unlike most modern mountain-town surgery centers. There are nooks and crannies for private conversations. The group therapy rooms and dining areas are large and sunny. The gym rooms have stationary bikes and treadmills positioned in front of wall-to-wall windows and televisions for online instruction as well as space for in-person exercise classes.

The kitchen has a massive walk-in cooler and limited pantry space as Lindley and his team elevate nutrition — both for patients and employees — without much processed food. 

The sunlight, privacy, outdoor spaces and focus on “exercise, nutrition and mindfulness as part of the care practice and the providers we are bringing in, I do not think there’s anything like this in the country,” Lindley said. 

“We built this around a facility we ourselves want to be treated in and what we want for our own kids,” he said. “So everything we did was like “Is this how we’d want it for our kids, our family and our loved ones?”

Another unique approach: patients are monitored with a digital infrared system that does not include worn wires connected to beeping, blinking gizmos. The Oxe Health monitors — they look like a mini-split in the wall above the bed in every patient room —  deliver instant thermal data on pulse and breathing rates, sleep and activity, allowing caretakers to watch patients without disruptive check-ins or machines.  

“Without something like this, it’s the staff kind of leaning in to see, ‘Are they asleep? Are they awake? Are they OK? Shoot, I need to use a flashlight.’ If you were asleep. You’re awake now,” said Kimberly Goodrich, who is in charge of improving Vail Health ’s Community Mental Health Center. “If we can help patients sleep without someone putting a flashlight in their face every 15 minutes, they get way more rest, which is helpful when you’re undergoing stress.”

Lindley and Goodrich are over-the-top excited about the new Precourt Healing Center. They’ve toured all the psychiatric hospitals in the state, mostly to affirm what not to do. 

“So when you talk about the  differences between  regular medical care and  behavioral health, there is a big eye to safety and making sure that people cannot hurt themselves. But we still try to make it nice, with aesthetically pleasing colors and textures, everything we can do to make it feel a little homey,” said Goodrich, touring the facility in the month before its planned opening. “I feel like we need rugs in here, maybe,”

It’s not just about patient experience. Thought went into what family members feel when they visit.

“It’s not like this is a confinement center or holding center or punishment. Most other places you go in the state, like it’s all plastic chairs and black colors and it’s not warm. So even the family gets agitated because they’re worried just from the lobby,” Lindley said. 

The campus also will lack formal security guards. Security personnel will not be wearing uniforms and every employee of the  facility will be trained in deescalation and everyone — from the doctors to the cleaners — will be able to help in an emergency. Right now, the Edwards facility sees about 5,000 outpatients a month and there’s never been an incident. (That’s up from zero before Vail Health launched its behavioral health program in 2019 to help address struggling residents in mountain communities.)

“For all the other psychiatric hospitals out there hopefully this raises the bar for them,” Lindley said. 

Mountain Strong program available to 15,000 valley workers

It’s not just the design of the Precourt Healing Center that is a new model for community health facilities. The center’s operations are shifting the way people get mental health care. 

Starting with hiring. When Precourt opens in a few months there will be 200 people working at the community health campus. 

“We have got a lot of interest which is really exciting,” said Kileen Ihlenfeldt, the director of behavioral health nursing in charge of hiring staff. (Precourt is still hiring.)

A lot of that has to do with the new model unfolding at the Precourt Healing Center, Ihlenfeldt said.  

Not even five years ago, there were very few adolescent psychiatrists available in the valley. There were even fewer therapists who took insurance. Now, after four years of work to expand access to mental health care, Vail Health has 60 clinicians and licensed mental health care providers and more are coming onboard. There are 180 other behavior services providers, all part of the valleywide Mountain Strong employee assistance program that began in 2020 and now has dozens of employers offering mental health care to more than 15,000 workers between Vail and Dotsero. 

“Now we have all these people really being part of the bigger solution, even though they all work for different entities, which is amazing,” Lindley said. 

When you ask the newly arrived mental health professionals why they chose the Eagle River Valley, “they say it’s to be part of this team-based approach,” Lindley said. 

“So there’s a lot of other resources for our providers, so they’re not one-person shops, right? They don’t have to work every weekend. They can take vacations with their families and get some reprieve themselves because there’s a substantial team that’s available to support them,” he said. “And that’s not the normal model, especially in outpatient facilities across the country. These folks, you know they’re tied to their patients all the time, so they themselves burn out because they can’t take time off. So with this inpatient facility, they will have all these additional services and support that is not  usually part of a psychiatric hospital.”

Increasing insurance coverage for mental health

The facility will take just about all forms of insurance as well as Medicaid and Medicare. There are few community mental health providers offering both inpatient and outpatient services that take insurance “because that model is not sustainable,” Lindley said. 

Vail Health has worked with insurance companies to expand coverage for mental health services. Five years ago, the reimbursement rates from insurance providers were not enough to even cover the cost of the therapists, let alone the support services and facilities. The wait list to see the handful of mental health providers in the Eagle River Valley was months long. Now, insurance providers pay for local care and most people can see a provider within a week.

“We have been able to push the insurance companies over the last five years to get fair, equitable rates for outpatient care that match our physical health rates,” Lindley said. “That makes this a sustainable model.”

But it’s a model that requires vigilance, with a team that constantly works to get reimbursements and prevents improper denials by insurers. 

“We spend a lot of time, money and effort on working with the insurance companies to get reimbursed. And it’s tough, because at any time they can say no for whatever reason they want, and we don’t have a lot to push back with,” said Lindley, crediting a Vail Health mediator who works with insurers to get fair contracts for services. 

That has helped Vail Health commit more than $200 million to mental health care in the Eagle River Valley. That includes money from the nonprofit Vail Health hospital as well as local philanthropy — like that from Eagle County’s Precourt family — to get the Edwards healing center built and on its feet.

Will Cook, the head of Vail Health, said in a statement that the Precourt Healing Center “will allow our friends, neighbors, and family members to remain within our community for care and ensure they do not fall through the cracks after they leave the facility.”

Lindley said since 2019 “a massive community push” with private donors, local governments, the school district and Vail Health “have really elevated the cause and the dream and made it bigger than anyone ever imagined.” The effort sprang from the February 2018 suicide of Olivia Ortega, a 13-year-old from Eagle whose family searched far and wide for local mental health care as she was bullied. 

Olivia’s Fund now offers free mental health care sessions to anyone in the valley and is among 13 new behavioral health nonprofits supported by Vail Health.

“It’s really remarkable that Vail Health has led the way — creating a model for the entire country — with a health care system that goes all-in on behavioral health in a way that has never been done before,” Lindley said.

New research could support changes in care

The outpatient facility will have a research wing where insights and medical results will be tracked to further prove the new model for improving a community’s mental health. The research is being led by Lindley and Dr. Charles Raison, a psychiatrist and professor at the University of Wisconsin – Madison.

The research includes the ongoing CHILL’D study exploring how sauna and cold plunge therapies work for people enduring depression. Another study is tracking the effectiveness of psilocybin treatments on anxiety and depression using stimulation of the vagus nerve through the earlobe. Vail Health will be opening a clinician-guided natural medicine micro-healing center on the campus this spring with research from that facility assessing the risks and benefits of psilocybin therapies. The Edwards campus includes the free-food Community Market, mental health clinicians with Your Hope Center and the My Futures Pathways group that works with young Latinos in the valley.

But don’t think Vail Health’s expanding community health mission is in response to a societal  worsening of our mental health, Lindley said. Things are not getting worse as much as everyone is paying more attention. 

Lindley said there is pent up demand for mental health care as more people gain insurance coverage for care. And the stigma around mental health care is fading as more people speak openly about the value of therapy. 

“And finally, which I think is most important, is that people are now putting their behavioral health at the same level of their physical health,” Lindley said. “So no, I don’t think conditions in our valley are getting worse. I think they are actually getting better because people are using more services more often.”