by Rachna Bagdi on December 18, 2024
The certified community behavioral health clinics (CCBHC) model has impacted millions of lives nationwide thanks to its focus on delivering affordable, high-quality care to individuals with mental health or substance use disorders regardless of diagnosis or insurance status. According to the National Council for Mental Wellbeing, the model has driven a 72% reduction in hospitalizations, a 40.7% reduction in homelessness, and a 60.3% reduction in jail time for clients with behavioral health conditions.
Success at these levels wouldn’t be possible, however, without the electronic health records (EHRs) that serve as the backbone of CCBHC workflows. An advanced behavioral health EHR provides the technological infrastructure to support individualized client care and effective collaboration among providers, thus driving improvements that positively impact outcomes.
But not every EHR is created equal. If you’re not seeing impressive results from your behavioral health EHR, it might be time to integrate a more advanced solution and one that’s tailored specifically to your CCBHBC’s unique needs. Here are seven signs it’s time to make the technology upgrade.
1. You're losing track of clients in the system.
To ensure clients receive the most appropriate, comprehensive care and stay on track with their treatment or crisis management plans, CCBHCs must accurately assess their conditions, regularly measure their progress, and engage them at every stage of their journey, from initial visit to post-treatment observation. Not assessing or engaging with clients for long stretches of time within the CCBHC model can indicate a lapse in care, possibly resulting in poor clinical outcomes and safety risks — especially if clients aren’t being held accountable to care plan adherence. An EHR that provides up-to-date data and streamlines communications and operations can allow you to effectively monitor and engage clients throughout their care journey.
Core Solutions’ Cx360 EHR, for example, offers real-time insights into a client’s progress, giving CCBHCs timely data that informs better decision-making and helps ensure optimal next steps for care and support. The platform even comes with a risk scoring solution, which scans provider notes to identify clients at higher risk of comorbidities, hospitalization, health-related social needs (HRSN), or self-harm.
Similarly, the Core Clinician Assist: Symptom Tracking mental health software solution uses natural language processing to spot hard-to-see symptoms. It then uses data from the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10) to connect those symptoms to potential diagnoses.
Solutions like these enable providers to stay on top of diagnoses, treatments, crisis management plans, and client needs to help ensure every client stays on track. Functionality like client/provider communication tools and easy appointment scheduling further ensure that clients have the tools they need to remain engaged in their care.
2. Your readmission and hospitalization rates are high.
In addition to the National Council for Mental Wellbeing, organizations like the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services have reported lower rates of hospital readmission and emergency department usage under the CCBHC model. Part of what drives these successful outcomes is CCBHCs’ focus on using evidence-based practices for client care.
If your readmission rates are higher than the norm, you might need a mental health software solution that provides timely access to these best practices. The Cx360 EHR, for example, has integrated checklists with evidence-based practices that aid in clinical decision-making. Combined with custom risk-factor protocols and symptom tracking, the platform can enable CCBHCs to provide the best individualized care possible.
3. You and your DCOs aren’t on the same page.
The CCBHC model involves a complex web of providers, with clinics partnering with designated collaborating organizations (DCOs) to better ensure continuous, high-quality care. But for this care coordination to work seamlessly, CCBHCs need tools that foster real-time collaboration and communication.
Experiencing miscommunication or misalignment with DCOs might be a sign that your CCBHC needs a new behavioral health EHR that supports better teamwork. The Cx360 platform can help you avoid communication breakdowns by enabling providers to coordinate roles, responsibilities, and role-based permissions through a custom coordination system.
Through Cx360, CCBHCs and DCOs can also access provider notes and treatment plans at any time through a secure portal and communicate through their preferred channel (chat, text, or phone) to align on a client’s treatment and support plan. In this way, the platform not only ensures everyone stays aligned, but it also allows providers to adapt to new client information in real time.
4. You’re spending too much time — and money — on manual processes.
CCBHCs are required to collect and regularly report clinic data to their state. The state then uses those insights to inform billing costs and benchmarking for the proceeding year. Given the breadth of data required, using manual processes to gather these insights can be time-consuming and costly while increasing the likelihood of data entry errors.
If most of your staff’s time is going toward manual data collection or client care logistics rather than clinical care, you would likely benefit from behavioral health EHR upgrade. The Cx360 platform automates many processes, freeing up provider time to focus on clients. Clinics can set custom data collection rules, for example, which the platform uses to gather real-time data on clinic operations, client outcomes, and treatment progress. With this data, CCBHCs can save significant time on required data collection and accurately assess their organizational impact — allowing providers to optimize their workflows and care processes for the betterment of all.
5. Your state can’t set custom payment rates for your clinic.
The data that CCBHCs report to their state informs payment rates based on yearly projections. The process allows clinics to better serve their clients while maintaining affordable costs and financial sustainability. If the data isn’t complete or accurate, however, the state might be unable to determine accurate payment rates, which may impact clients’ abilities to access affordable care.
If this is the case for your clinic, consider adopting a solution with integrated billing and diverse funding source management. Core Solutions’ EHR allows providers to set unique billing rules tailored to their context and integrate data from multiple sources through one central platform. This helps on two fronts: CCBHCs can use the platform to automate data collection for more effective and timely reporting — boosting collaboration with their state — and they can use this mental health software to efficiently manage their revenue cycles with minimal errors.
6. You aren’t targeting population-based health challenges.
Your clinic might be addressing individual needs effectively, but if you aren’t identifying population-based health-related social needs, you might be missing a key part of the picture. As the linchpin of a care model designed to provide services to all, including historically underserved communities, CCBHCs only thrive when they’re able to understand the conditions in which the people they serve live (the social determinants of health, or SDOH) and the resulting HRSN that affect their ability to maintain good health and well-being.
Core Clinician Assist: HRSN Tracking uses artificial intelligence to quickly scan massive datasets and provider notes to identify the social and economic needs that impact clients’ health. The solution then connects this population-based data with individual client needs and serves up this data at the point of care to support improved clinical decision-making.
7. You’ve been fined for non-compliance.
Compliance with regulatory requirements is a necessity for all behavioral healthcare providers. If your clinic is struggling to keep up with ever-evolving CCBHC requirements, consider a solution that takes on much of that work for you.
With the Cx360 platform, for example, CCBHCs can access a compliance tracker with set deadlines, roles, and data fields for better ensuring ongoing regulatory compliance. Providers can assign role-based task lists for compliance-related responsibilities and use custom dashboards for assessing deadlines and tasks.
Time to Upgrade Your CCBHC’s Behavioral Health EHR
From providing real-time data and evidence-based practices, to bolstering provider communication, to saving time and money, the Cx360 behavioral health EHR can ensure your clinic is always operating at its best and your clients are always receiving proper care and support. Ready to make the switch? Request a demo today.
