Virtual Behavioral Health for Youth and Teens Available with Bend Health

Sauk Prairie Healthcare is partnering with Bend Health to provide virtual behavioral health services to primary care patients 2 through 17 years old.

Bend Health is a national pediatric health provider that delivers care to families with kids, teens, and young adults. Their services and care plans are designed to address general concerns and specific conditions like ADHD, depression, anxiety, OCD, neurodiversity, trauma/PTSD, and more. Bend Health’s virtual appointments and flexible scheduling allows patients to be seen sooner, reducing the wait times they may experience elsewhere.

This collaboration between Sauk Prairie Healthcare and Bend Health began in 2022 as a pilot program. Now providers at all four of Sauk Prairie Healthcare’s primary care clinics – Lodi, River Valley, Plain, and Wisconsin Heights Clinics – can refer patients to Bend Health for behavioral and mental health care.

"Our partnership with Bend Health on whole-person, whole-family mental healthcare has accelerated access to care from six to 18 months to a matter of days, solving an especially critical challenge for rural communities,” said Dr. Ellen Wermuth, a family medicine physician at Sauk Prairie Healthcare’s River Valley Clinic.

Sauk Prairie Healthcare primary care providers can also offer virtual neuropsychological evaluations to patients 2 through 25 years old with Bend Health. These evaluations help families and providers better understand a patient’s functioning in areas like memory, attention, perception, coordination, language, and personality, and can help to uncover academic difficulties, ADHD, Autism Spectrum Disorder, brain injury, learning disorders, and more.

Families interested in Bend Health services or a neuropsychological evaluation should talk to their Sauk Prairie Healthcare primary care provider about a referral.