If you want to succeed in the Behavioral Healthcare business you need to be turning toward a data driven analytical approach to your decision making if you aren’t already. The introduction of Managed Care has solidified the need for agencies to track, report, and improve on key metrics in order to justify the amount you are getting from payers and that is not likely to change any time soon.
It is with this trend in mind that TenEleven CEO, Alex Alexander, has been speaking at conferences in the past year presenting a talk entitled “Reports Don’t Improve Outcomes!” – to ensure that amidst all the noise about behavioral healthcare’s need for reporting services that the true point doesn’t get lost. Reports only show you information, it’s the actions you take based on the information that will make your agency better and improve outcomes for your clients.
You can read the white paper “Reports Don’t Improve Outcomes!” here.
After walking audiences through how to use the Data-to-Wisdom Continuum to collect discrete data, turn it into reports, take action, and measure the improvements for further actions; there was one question consistently asked. “At the conclusion of every presentation this year, the question I would always get is ‘how do we know which data we should be measuring to begin with?,” said Alexander. “My answer is always twofold. You can start with industry recognized measures that have been studied and implemented by others. Or, the other way is to use Discovery Data Mining techniques with the data you do have to help you identify the data you want to have.”
- Established Measurements
In order to help behavioral healthcare agencies further answer this question, TenEleven is announcing a new blog series – Things You Should Measure in Behavioral Health (TYSM) – to help you with business and clinical metrics that you can measure and take action to improve. Subscribe to the TenEleven Resource Corner blog to get updated TYSM posts.
See established behavioral health measurements here http://www.samhsa.gov/samhsa-data-outcomes-quality
- Discovery Data Mining
The other way to help decide what you should be measuring is to look at the data you do have and dig into it to uncover new insights that will spawn new ideas for how you can look at your business. TenEleven supports the use of visual representations of your data to manipulate and explore until you can create meaningful relationships that will either spur you into action, or tell you what additional data you want to capture and measure about your agency.
To get you started with Discovery Data Mining we have published the white paper “Who’s your best clinician?” This paper will introduce you to the concept of Discovery Data Mining by telling you a real life story of an agency CEO that drew some interesting conclusions by manipulating data to determine who the best clinician in his agency was.
