Brigitte Johnson, Esq., President and CEO, Care Plus NJ. The organization provides mental health, addiction treatment, and social support services and is a member of the Quality Institute’s Provider Council.

You have been with Care Plus NJ since 1998 and now replace CEO and founder Joe Masciandaro, who retired after 40 years. What are your priorities for the future of Care Plus NJ? 

Your question is timely because we recently had an extensive board retreat. We had sessions on Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging and we also looked at our mission, values, and strategic priorities. Our priorities are to continue improving the client experience … streamlining access to services, especially our self-referral online process, ease of website navigation and improvement of our communications.

Our strategic priorities also include plans to improve the physical plant of some of our existing sites.  We are also looking to expand geographically, particularly where there are health care disparities, and access to care needs, that we can help address.

How do you integrate behavioral and physical care?

We embedded primary care into our practice to help our clients. We have psychiatrists, health navigators, case managers and clinical staff. And we have a residential group home. Many of our patients, for instance, struggle with diabetes, issues with weight, high blood pressure, etc. What we do is refer those clients who need health care to our primary care providers. We serve over 14,000 clients, and our clients can walk from one side of the building to the other to get their primary care needs met.

How has telehealth impacted the way Care Plus NJ delivers care?

Before the pandemic, we had three licenses, with very limited usage. We were working to expand telehealth. The pandemic forced us to speed up these plans. We increased the number of licenses until we purchased 100 licenses. We ensured we had licenses to provide telehealth from all our locations. Now all our service providers are trained and have access to provide services via telehealth to any client, and telehealth options are embedded into our practice. Our Quality Improvement team monitors usage of the telehealth platform on a weekly basis. Our team generates reports on usage, which are reviewed by managers/staff, especially the prescribers. Our clients now expect to be offered a Telehealth option and we’re advocating to keep the telehealth model in place.

Care Plus NJ has a Maternal and Family Center that addresses postpartum mental health for both mothers and fathers. What have you learned through this critical work that could inform the larger understanding of postpartum mental health treatment? 

Care Plus is a certified community behavioral health clinic (CCBHC) and we were one of seven providers in New Jersey that received a grant from SAMHSA to advance this work. In 2020, we received a CCBHC expansion grant and decided to focus on gaps between maternal, physical, and mental health providers. NJ ranks 47th in maternal deaths. For women and families of color, the statistics are even more extreme: 47 women die, on average, for every 100,000 live births in New Jersey compared to 20 nationally. Our director commented that most providers in the field are providing very basic mental health care and really don’t understand the effects of postpartum depression. Our staff members are trained and certified in perinatal mood and anxiety disorders, or PMAD. Since 2020, we have trained over a thousand professionals and community organizations on PMAD, implementing the use of universal screening tools, as well as how to connect individuals to treatment.  We give credit to the dedication of our leadership in this field: Melissa Sampath Oparaku, Vice President, Community Mental Health Services, and LaDeana Artis, Clinical Director for the Maternal and Family Center.

How is Care Plus NJ focused on hiring and retaining a vibrant and diverse health care workforce? 

The pandemic brought a lot of issues such as staffing to the forefront. We’ve previously had a part-time recruiter. But now we have hired a full-time recruiter, from a diverse background himself. We made recruitment a high priority. We started looking at different schools within our community and targeted social work associations for Hispanic, Latino and Asians to build those populations. Cultural humility is a big training that we also mandate for our staff. We’re trying to introduce this concept of blind resumes, meaning we take the name and identifying characteristics off the resumes. Our managers are not there yet with that concept, but it’s something that we worked on. And we’ve become more competitive with our salaries.

Finally, we like to ask a question beyond your professional life. Do you have a favorite New Jersey artist, performer, writer or singer?

Bruce Springsteen popped up first, and Whitney Houston. Those are my two top New Jersey performers.