Why It’s Time for a Tech Overhaul
By Jim Szyperski, CEO, Acuity Behavioral Health
LinkedIn: Jim Szyperski
LinkedIn: Acuity Behavioral Health
Despite growing attention to mental health, inpatient psychiatric care remains a neglected and the least digitized sector of healthcare. While hospitals have made enormous strides in optimizing emergency departments, operating rooms, and ICUs with real-time data, the same cannot be said for behavioral health units. Here, critical operations decisions still rely on clinician intuition over hard data, leaving staff stretched thin, patients without consistent care, and hospitals at odds with value-based care standards. This is a clinical problem careening towards system failure.
In a healthcare environment increasingly governed by accountability and outcomes, psychiatric care has been left behind. Psychiatric inpatient behavioral health units remain largely unchanged by technology advances, still operating with manual workflows, paper-based rounding sheets, siloed data systems, and inconsistent handoffs between providers. Unlike medical-surgical floors, there is no real-time visibility into census trends, staff workloads, acuity levels, or patient safety risks. Even in units that see high volumes of acute crises, decision making often comes down to gut instinct—what a nurse sees on the floor, what a psychiatrist recalls from rounds, what’s scribbled in a binder at the nurse’s station. Meanwhile, frontline providers are burning out.
Psychiatric staff are often asked to do more with less: fewer beds, higher patient acuity, and systemic staffing shortages. They work in very high-stress environments with little to no visibility of information that could better help them manage their patients and units. Hospitals who have the option to close down psychiatric units have in most cases done so, citing operational complexity and rising costs. A recent ABC7 News investigation revealed how psychiatric beds are vanishing across the country, even as suicide rates, substance use disorders, and mental health crises reach historic highs.
The question many leaders are now asking is: if we can use predictive analytics to manage OR throughput and ICU capacity, why aren’t we doing the same for behavioral health?
Some health systems are beginning to answer that call.
Drawing inspiration from operational intelligence platforms used in other hospital departments, a growing number of behavioral health leaders are reimagining psychiatric care with the same rigor and transparency applied to other specialties. The idea is simple but powerful: use real-time data to inform decisions, allocate resources, and optimize care. That means surfacing patterns in patient acuity, standardizing processes across units, flagging risks before they escalate, and proactively informing staff with key patient information to help them do their work —all without adding to their documentation burden. This shift doesn’t replace clinical judgment; it enhances it.
Modern psychiatric care must balance the complexity of human behavior with the realities of healthcare delivery. Real-time visibility into census shifts, staffing gaps, patient acuity, and escalation risks doesn’t diminish the art of psychiatric medicine, it strengthens it with essential operational context. It enables nurse managers to staff more strategically, empowers therapists and social workers to prioritize caseloads effectively, and provides clinicians with a consistent framework and shared standards of care. For administrators, it offers a unified view of how behavioral health units are performing within the larger hospital ecosystem. This kind of transformation isn’t just helpful, it’s urgently needed.
As psychiatric care becomes a larger share of hospital admissions and ED visits, health systems must bring behavioral health into the fold of modern hospital operations. That means moving away from fragmented, analog approaches and toward unified platforms that can track, analyze, and guide care in real time. The result is better patient outcomes and better care delivery at scale.
Early adopters of behavioral health operations intelligence are already seeing results: reduced attrition, fewer safety incidents, better throughput, and higher staff satisfaction. They’re building a future where psychiatric care is no longer an island of improvisation in a sea of structured medical systems, but a fully integrated part of the hospital’s strategic and clinical framework.