A Shared Belief That People Deserve Better: Dennis Hobb on the Origins of McClendon Center’s Partnership with AmeriHealth Caritas DC​

A Conversation with Former Executive Director of McClendon Center Dennis Hobb

The best ideas for the people we serve rarely start in a conference room. They start in the community with a problem nobody has solved yet and someone willing to act. 

Dennis Hobb joined McClendon Center in 2003 and served as Executive Director from 2010 to 2020, a period of significant growth and innovation for the organization. Among the developments that defined those years was the launch of a partnership with AmeriHealth Caritas DC rooted in a simple but powerful belief: that people living with serious mental health challenges deserve better. 

That belief gave rise to the Patient Discharge Coordination program, a model conceived and developed by McClendon Center to ensure that people experiencing psychiatric inpatient care could transition back into the community with real support behind them.  

Launched in partnership with AmeriHealth Caritas DC and built on the Center’s frontline experience, PDC deployed community-based teams to meet individuals before discharge, coordinating psychiatric care, medication management, substance use treatment, housing, and benefits. When someone leaves a psychiatric hospitalization, the days and weeks that follow are among the most precarious of their recovery. PDC was built to close that gap. 

Since its launch in March 2015, the program has reached more than 26,000 DC residents, reconnecting high-need individuals to care, reducing readmissions, and providing individualized pathways to mental health treatment and community resources.  

This September 17, AmeriHealth Caritas DC will receive McClendon Center’s inaugural Transforming Lives Award at Art of Transformation in recognition of more than a decade of this partnership. 

We recently sat down with Dennis to learn more about how that partnership came to be, what it took to build it, and what he hopes people understand about community mental health. 

You came to McClendon Center in 2003. Can you tell us a little about your path to community mental health? 

I started my career working with delinquent teenagers. First in a detention center, then in a group home. I did outpatient case management in Seattle for a while, and when I came back to the Midwest in 1986, I decided I didn’t want to work with kids anymore. There was a job open at a mental health agency for a case manager, and I applied. I was making all of $13,200 a year and I thought I had hit pay dirt. After about a year, my boss left and I became the director of the program. You just add two things and expand and take more things on, that’s how it works. 

I eventually came to DC in 2000. I worked at Green Door, which was one of the premier community mental health programs in the country at the time. The need for a new model of community care was increasingly evident and after several years there, the opportunity at McClendon came along, and I took it. 

When I arrived in 2003, McClendon Center had just become its own nonprofit, separate from New York Avenue Presbyterian Church (NYAPC). The Day Program was primarily serving an older population. The average age was probably around 70. It was a very docile kind of program. I was hired specifically to help adapt to the newly-evolving Medicaid model, and that’s when things began to change. 

The organization grew significantly during your tenure, including a period of very rapid expansion. What was that like? 

In 2009, the city closed its own core service agency and we tripled in size in five months or less. It nearly killed me. We were doing sometimes 80 intakes a week. We had to hire fast, and we weren’t getting reimbursement yet, so we were extended far out on credit just from hiring people. I would wake up in the middle of the night thinking we were going to have to close and find places for all these clients, and all these staff were going to be out of jobs. 

That was also the year I hired Michael Burt, who was 23 years old at the time. Shean came on in 2008 as a case manager. I didn’t work with her directly day-to-day, but I reviewed charts, and I could see that she always followed through. It wasn’t just a job for her. She just has this need to achieve and to do right and to do it with honesty. Not every case manager has that. When it came time to build out leadership, I knew she would be really good. She’s even better than that. 

But those days were so challenging. When the Board finally said we’re done growing, I thought: thank you. 

Let’s talk about the AmeriHealth Caritas DC partnership. How did it begin? 

It was July of 2014. Karen Dale came to a DC Behavioral Health Association meeting with her then-CFO and said, essentially: we are responsible for a large population of members, and we are seeing far more psychiatric hospitalizations than we ever expected, with too many being readmitted. We would welcome proposals from anyone here on how to help. 

I thought everyone in that room was going to be on this bandwagon. So I got an appointment with her for the very next day. 

Our clinical director at the time and I had done a lot of reading on what actually works for people who are hospitalized with serious mental illness. The evidence was clear: you start planning for discharge at the moment of admission, you have someone present throughout the hospitalization, and you make sure that when they leave, they get to their first follow-up appointment. That was the core of what we brought to AmeriHealth the next day. It was rough, we were working on iPhone 5s, no laptops, but the idea was solid. 

What she immediately understood was something that office-based case managers, for all their value, simply can’t do: provide the kind of direct, consistent support that keeps someone on track through a crisis. If you don’t make sure someone gets to their appointment, they often won’t make it. That’s just the reality.  

Getting a new program approved through a large managed care organization sounds complicated. What did that process look like? 

AmeriHealth Caritas DC is part of a much larger organization operating in many states. What we were proposing was pretty different: a different contract structure, delivered by non-clinical case managers rather than professionals. It took time to get it approved, even on a temporary basis. 

I remember very clearly being back in Kansas City visiting family in early December of 2014, typing out our proposal on my iPhone. I was going back and forth with their quality improvement nurse, sending revisions, receiving suggestions, sending it back. Over the course of about four hours, we had the proposal done. It was approved toward the end of January 2015, and we started seeing clients in March. 

We hired Caitlin Apo, who you know as McClendon Center’s current Clinical Director, to build and lead the team. She had been a team leader at McClendon for about six months, and this was going to be something completely new. At the time, we found out there were only about 12 or 13 programs like this in the entire country. Caitlin hired an incredible group of people and they just ran with it.

Were there obstacles in getting the program off the ground once it launched? 

The biggest challenge early on was gaining access to patients inside psychiatric hospitals. Most inpatient units weren’t used to having outside community workers come in to see patients during their stay. One hospital had an administrator who simply wouldn’t let our team in. 

Our medical director at the time, Steve Steury, knew their medical director. He arranged a round of golf, they talked it through, and after that we were in. That’s how things work sometimes. I don’t know whether to laugh or shake my head, but it worked, and once we were inside, the inpatient staff genuinely welcomed us. They liked working with our team. It contributed to a really early success. 

What did success actually look like in those early months? 

Karen showed me a case that I’ve never forgotten. A man who had been chronically hospitalized — he was homeless, living around Union Station, dealing with schizophrenia and other serious medical conditions. He was being readmitted constantly. The cost of his care over just a few months before we got involved was staggering. 

After PDC got involved, that number dropped by roughly 90%. And they kept seeing the same pattern across the population — individual after individual, the curve looked the same. People were stabilizing. Hospitalizations were declining. The outcomes were real. 

What has AmeriHealth’s partnership meant to the work? 

There’s a moment that has stayed with me. I called Karen once with a concern about the program, and her response was immediate: the outcomes you’re getting us are incredible. Let me worry about the rest:  just get me the outcomes. 

That’s the kind of partner AmeriHealth has been. They understand that what matters is what was happening for people. That belief is what made this partnership work. 

What does this partnership mean to you – looking back on it now? 

It means that community mental health organizations don’t have to wait for the system to change before they can do something different. AmeriHealth stood up in a room in July of 2014 and asked for help. We showed up the next day with an idea typed on a phone. Two months later we had a proposal. A year later we had a program. And more than ten years later, that program has served over 25,000 DC residents. 

Innovation in this field is hard. There are great ideas everywhere, but it’s hard to find the right partner and even harder to get something to stick. The fact that this partnership has lasted more than a decade, and that it’s still growing, is a testament to what’s possible when two organizations genuinely trust each other and keep the focus on the people they’re there to serve. 

McClendon Center honoring AmeriHealth Caritas DC with the inaugural Transforming Lives Award is exactly right. This is the kind of partnership that deserves to be celebrated. 

 

AmeriHealth Caritas DC will receive McClendon Center’s inaugural Transforming Lives Award at Art of Transformation on September 17, 2026, 6–8 PM at the True Reformer Building, 1200 U Street NW, Washington, DC. Limited tickets remain available at mcclendoncenter.org/AOT.