Bernalillo County Behavioral Health Services
In Bernalillo County, a series of high-profile behavioral health-related challenges led to an allocated $17 million per year for the county to spend on providing high-risk populations with targeted behavioral health services. The GPL provided pro bono technical assistance to help the county develop a strategic procurement system to most effectively spend the newly allocated dollars, which included identifying behavioral health service needs, best practices, and priority populations as well as developing and implementing a problem-based procurement template that minimized prescriptiveness and focused on specific outcomes. The County’s first initiative will provide over 10,000 children with a variety of behavioral health interventions that aim to prevent adverse childhood experiences. Since then, the county has continued to expand its behavioral health service array through the new procurement framework, providing new youth transitional living services, community engagement teams, and mobile crisis teams.