Chair Cabán on relay program phone and incentive cuts

I want to move to the relay program.

The executive plan would include a baseline reduction of $2 million starting in FY26 for the relay program to eliminate spending on phones and monetary incentives for participation like gift cards and things.

And I'm going to...

I'm concerned about this.

I want to know what the rationale is choosing this area for savings and why this is a benefit that's being cut off.

And I'm going to give an example again.

I come from the public defense world, so this is the easiest example.

When they provided clients with cell phones, the warrant rates dropped exponentially by just simply sending a text message to our clients about when they had to come back to court.

Like this is really, I think, a really, really critical thing.

You know, cell phones, they keep people engaged.

They allow service providers to be proactively connected with clients.

So I'm just wondering what the rationale was for that $2 million.

Cut.

Yeah, thank you for that question, Chair Kavanaugh.

First of all, let me just say a few words about the Relay Program.

This is a program that is a wonder, really.

Myself as an ER physician, having a patient who wakes up from a non-fatal overdose, having a peer there to help them track the course to recovery is just an incredible intervention.

We've been able to contract with over a dozen hospitals and emergency departments to expand this program.

The savings that you're seeing is not a cut to the staff or any of the people that are involved.

And so we thought it was important to make sure that, you know, in order to execute this program, that no staff that provide the services were part of that savings.

But there are tools that are critical.

Like, I understand that you're not cutting any staff, but it is eliminating spending on, like I said, phones or other things that have been shown to sort of help with participation and continuity of care.

So just, again, hoping for the rationale behind the decision to cut back on that.

Yeah.

Maybe I can kick it over to Dr.

Rebecca Lin-Moan.

Sure, yes.

The cut was to an enhancement to existing.

We certainly do do gift cards.

I can, like, we have an amazing storage system that I've gone through in our building with how to find it.

So we certainly absolutely support it.

And so we already do do gift cards.

We all do, we do work with people on their phone and how to follow up with them and make sure that we do have ways to connect with them, talk to you if they're already talking to like homeless services, how do we engage their case manager there.

So this was just something that was supposed to start.

We hadn't yet.

Oh, okay.

So do you currently spend on phones for participants in the relay program?

We don't have phones, but we do do the gift card to enhance people being able to follow.

Okay, got it.

So basically.

hear you 100% on the evidence.

We haven't, we're not taking away the phones.

We would start the phone program, but we chose to not start it.

I think we should.

I think we should be doing it.

And probably, you know.

Giving phones to people is also probably cheaper than having more people to send out to go find them, not quite knowing where to locate them, for example.

So I just, yeah, I'm a little concerned about that.

But what is...

What's the contracted budget for the relay program?

I think that was mentioned, but how many contracts does it fund, and who are the service providers under those contracts?

Yeah, thank you for that question, Chair.

We have a total of 13 emergency departments that we're currently contracting with.

We can get you the full list in a follow-up.

Great, thank you.