Rachal Green, Executive Vice-President – Sarah E.Sanders, Co-Founder, Executive Vice-President – Natalie Whatcott, Co-Founder, President, Utah Behavior Services

For decades, behavioral health has been mostly an afterthought despite its overwhelming impacts on the young population and communities. According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, an estimated 44 million adults live with a mental illness in the U.S., yet nearly 60% don’t receive treatment in a given year. However, now the tide seems to be turning assome pioneering companies are recognizing the need to redesign the care model and focusing on offering high quality, convenient, and cost-effective behavioral services across the full continuum of care. One such prominent organization that is rigorously working towards the goal of empowering people and families with the highest quality behavioral healthcare services is Utah Behavior Services (UTBS).

The origin of UTBS dates back to 2008 when two industry veterans, Natalie Whatcott and Sarah Sanders sensed the need for comprehensive Behavior and Mental Health Services in Utah. They realized that families often experience conflict and stress while receiving multiple services from multiple providers. Thus, UTBS was founded on the primary goal to ensure that families receive the highest quality behavior services available in Utah, and do it in a way that strengthens the entire family.

Natalie and Sarah started out by providing services to individual children as Board Certified Behavior Analysts. They noticed that when they focused solely on the affected child, the results were inconsistent and didn’t last long. They realized that an individual child would progress far more, and achieve a better outcome if the work was focused on the entire family unit instead. Thus, they started conducting intensive parent training and whole-home interventions where they included siblings, grandparents, and anyone important to the child or family. Shifting the focus and making this change not only resulted in improved behavioral health of children, but families were also being strengthened throughout the course of treatment. To be able to meet the needs of every family member, they partnered with mental health professionals, psychologists, and medical practitioners. Today, UTBS is Utah’s largest integrated behavioral health practice, serving the complex mental health needs of families across the state.

Delivering Multiple Cohesive Behavioral Healthcare Services

UTBS provides an array of specialized behavioral healthcare and mental health services including Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) /Autism Treatment, Medication Management, Psychological Evaluations, and individual and family counseling, all under one roof.  It has a well-coordinated, multidisciplinary team of highly skilled professionals with extensive years of experience in behavior, mental health, and medication management therapies. This strengthens the clients’ success as well as increases opportunities for families to receive the support they need from one unified team focused on the success of that family.  Also, the pioneering company uses modern approaches and tools such as fully customized Practice Management Software and Rapid Tele-Health implementation to further increase access to services and provide seamless services to its clients.

“Our vision is to support each individual by making the most of Utah Behavior Services’ interdisciplinary and highly educated team of professionals (mental health therapists, behavior clinicians, and doctorate level professionals), united with a family-centered plan designed to realize their full potential,” says Natalie.

Paving its Way through Challenges

According to Natalie, the biggest challenge faced by any budding company in the behavioral healthcare domain is to meet the ever-increasing need and demand for behavioral healthcare services while being able to grow and manage the growth as the company expands its team, and the ability to serve the communities. UTBS is successfully navigating through these challenges with a persistent and flexible approach of its diligent team that constantly strive for excellence.

“Our UTBS Family of employees, our flexible can-do attitude, and unity as a team has been the largest help by far. From our tenacious and resilient approach on issues to our team-oriented and demand for excellence in all we do to support and strengthen the clients and families we serve, has ensured the success of our team,” asserts Sarah.

The company believes in learning from the challenges and look at them as opportunities. “The opportunities have been countless. Overall the opportunity to STEP UP AND STEP IN to our communities and the families we serve has been the greatest opportunity of all,” adds Natalie.

Cultivating a Value-Driven People-Centric Culture

The uniqueness of UTBS also comes from its unwavering commitment to adhering to its core values that include a commitment to excellence, teamwork, resilience, and a never-give-up attitude. The company believes that its key to success lies in its ability to stand united and stay focused on the goal with a conviction that no matter what challenge it faces it will always rise again.

Further delineating on the differentiating strength of UTBS, Natalie asserts, “Another thing that sets us apart is that we learned early on to treat our team members like family, and to care for their families, too. We have always offered unique benefits to our team members that mattered most to them; when our workforce was mostly made up of young mothers, we offered in-house child care, which some locations still provide.”

UTBS understands how important mental health is and hence it offers free mental health visits along with free medical visits and medication management for all team members. “We strive to set the example for caring for families so that our team members can provide the same care to our clients,” adds Rachal.

Plans To Expand its Continuum of Care

Looking to the future, UTBS believes there is a critical need to exist in Utah for a higher level of care through a comprehensive, short-term residential treatment program. Thus, it intends to further expand its continuum of care for the population it serves, and offer a more effective solution for some of the most challenging individuals. It has already begun to explore this path and implement the planning process for opening this opportunity in the next 5 years.

Meanwhile, the company is also working toward the goal of being able to design and build its own treatment centers that are completely customized and totally designed to meet the needs of its clients, including beautiful outdoor spaces and playgrounds to allow children to work on goals that simply can’t be taught in a traditional classroom setting.

“We will be expanding our practice to allow our practitioners to serve more families, and to integrate even further with our other services, concludes Sarah.