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Mental health heavyweight headed to Scranton

Standard-Speaker - 3/15/2018

March 15--Unlike just about everyone else, Dr. Leighton Y. Huey wants to spend more time in drug treatment court.

The mental health heavyweight is Geisinger Commonwealth School of Medicine's new associate dean for behavioral health integration and community care transformation, a mouthful of a title with a fitting slate of responsibilities.

He plans to link two segments that are chronically held apart, mental and physical health, and he wants to pull in law enforcement and the courts, too.

Huey already opened talks with Lackawanna County President Judge Michael J. Barrasse, who oversees the county's drug treatment court, about connecting the best of mental health care with the justice system in combating addiction.

"I told Judge Barrasse the other day that I want to come and sit in on his drug treatment court," Huey said. "It can no longer be about individual silos working their own thing, in my opinion."

Huey, 75, also accepts a psychiatry professorship at the medical school.

He leaves behind an established career and a leadership position at the University of Connecticut where he was the chairman of the psychiatry department. Before that, he was vice chairman and medical director in psychiatry at Dartmouth Medical School.

Earlier in his career, Huey was medical director for mental health with the Scripps health system in La Jolla, California. There he led a multi-specialty group of 230 physicians and started a countywide behavioral health managed care group.

"He's basically at this beautiful place in his career that he doesn't have to do anything," said Dr. Linda Thomas-Hemak, president of the Wright Center for Graduate Medical Education, who helped recruit Huey and considers him a personal friend. "But he sees the capacity in the northeast region of Pennsylvania to build this incredible model that takes advantage of all his experience. It's incredible that he sees in the community what I'm not sure the community even sees in itself."

The medical school's Behavioral Health Initiative, or BHI, which seeks in part to link behavioral and physical health care, first caught Huey's attention.

"Having that be a top priority for the school of medicine is highly unique in this country because behavioral health -- I've described it as a lost planet," Huey said. "It can't be lost anymore. It can't be forgotten."

Funding from the AllOne Foundation, a charitable organization established when Highmark acquired Blue Cross of Northeastern Pennsylvania, was used in recruiting Huey. AllOne funding also played a part in creating the BHI following a community health needs assessment that revealed gaps in local mental health services.

"Leighton's recruitment is a testimony of the vision of the founders of The Commonwealth Medical College," Thomas-Hemak said, referring to the medical school by its name before Geisinger acquired it.

Huey will divide his hours, committing 40 percent of his time to the Wright Center, working with the psychiatry program residents and seeing patients. His arrival strengthens ties between the region's leading academic medical institutions.

He will work closely with Geisinger's Springboard Healthy Scranton, an initiative to make the city a vanguard for thriving community health. Springboard and the BHI were developed separately, but Springboard Healthy Scranton Senior Director Brian Ebersole said together the two can only propel each other forward.

"The synergy between Springboard and his job description are awesome," he said. "I'm excited to see him relocate and to see how the pieces begin to come together."

Contact the writer:

joconnell@timesshamrock.com; 570-348-9131

;

@jon_oc on Twitter

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