The following is an excerpt from the White Paper “Reports Don’t Improve Outcomes!”
The Behavioral Health Landscape
Wisdom is necessary in Behavioral Health because reports don’t improve outcomes in and of themselves, the best services do. The current mandate on Behavioral Health agencies is to report outcomes. The call is out for treatment providers to prove to payers that they are making positive and sustainable impacts on their clients. Insurance companies, government agencies, and private grant funders are just a few of the entities that want to see successful outcomes.
The Challenging Realities
So you have heard the call to reports on your outcomes and are looking for the behavioral health dashboards that will get you there. However, there are two realities that every agency faces:
- Not every report is going to show successful outcomes. This is ok, and it’s an important discovery to have now so that you can work with the Data-to-Wisdom continuum to make change.
- A report showing good results still has room for improvement. Recognizing that good can still be better is a commitment that every client deserves from every agency.
Ultimately, the provider must have a plan to internalize the message from the reports and make changes in the organization to continuously improve.
The Role of Technology
“Business Drives, Technology Enables”
Technology plays a huge role in each stage of the Data-to-Wisdom Continuum. The adoption of EHR’s has furthered the ability to capture data, organize it, and report it. However, business drives and technology enables, not the other way around. An investment in an EHR without a plan does not necessarily make you better. A plan driven by the clinical side of the business must be in place ideally before technology is purchased so that they IT investment enables the plan.
Report builders and dashboards are without a doubt an essential piece of the puzzle, but they all look in the rear view mirror.
Operating on the whole Data-to-Wisdom Continuum shifts the focus from merely reporting on the past – to taking action on the future.
