by Rachna Bagdi on November 14, 2024
Designed to address a surge in urgent and ongoing care needs for mental health and substance use disorders, the certified community behavioral health clinics (CCBHC) model requires clinics to continually optimize their operations. Not only is continuous quality improvement a core tenet of the model, but methods for evaluating and bolstering care delivery are baked directly into the system.
According to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), clinics must meet required quality measures and regularly report on their progress. This level of in-depth quality assessment requires keen insight into clinic operations and outcomes. That’s why many clinics are employing technology solutions that incorporate artificial intelligence (AI) tools to quickly access better data-driven insights.
Here are five actionable steps you can take to optimize your CCBHC’s data collection processes — and the data itself — for more effective quality improvement.
1. Stay Current on Operations With Real-Time Analytics
Quality improvement requires timely data. After all, how can you effectively solve a problem without the most up-to-date information?
It’s imperative for CCBHCs to use technology that enables them to access real-time analytics and insights into their quality of care delivery and overall organizational performance. This allows for prompt client interventions and targeted initiatives that can boost a clinic’s operations.
Consider Core Solutions’ Cx360, for example. Through this electronic health record (EHR), providers and staff can immediately access the latest data on clients’ treatment plans, clinic workflow efficiency, and large-scale behavioral healthcare issues through intuitive data visualizations. Providers can customize time frames and filters directly on their dashboards, enabling them to get the exact insights they need at exactly the right time.
Another Core Solutions tool, the AI-backed Core Clinician Assist: Symptom Tracking solution, assesses both progress notes for individual clients and clinic-wide datasets to spot hard-to-find behavioral health symptoms. Then, using embedded data from the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10) manual, it associates identified symptoms with potential diagnoses — laying the foundation for more accurate care planning and outcomes.
Solutions like these help reduce clinical and administrative errors, maximize operational effectiveness, and provide an advantage in the pursuit of quality improvement.
2. Integrate Data Collection Into Workflows So Nothing’s Lost
Every day, clinic and client data flows rapidly from CCBHC providers to designated collaborating organizations (DCOs) to clients and back. If your data collection technologies aren’t integrated into these workflows, you’re missing out on critical insights for quality improvement, such as patient diagnosis and treatment challenges, reductions in care plan adherence, and increases in hospitalization rates.
With customizable workflows, EHRs such as Cx360 can streamline data collection from the time a client first interacts with your staff and make it completer and more robust. Leading CCBHC EHRs offer the ability to incorporate behavioral health assessments directly into the digital intake process, edit forms to reflect CCBHC quality reporting needs, and build checklists and alerts into workflows to better ensure information on client progress and other vital data is being monitored, recorded, and incorporated into the evaluation of your clinic’s performance. EHRs also allow for the tracking of grant-specific metrics essential to quality measurement/improvement and funding.
3. Learn More From Multiple Data Sources
Care in the CCBHC model isn’t delivered in a vacuum, with DCOs extending the range and locations of services offered. Understanding the full picture of a client’s health and how to improve the quality of care delivery across all facilities therefore requires the collection of data from all providers that individuals see, such as primary care and psychiatric rehabilitation professionals, and from all digital information sources, like mental health records and inpatient histories.
AI-powered solutions integrated into your EHR, like Core Clinician Assist: Documentation, can streamline this data capture by quickly scanning client session notes and accurately summarizing them for easy review and sharing. Core Clinician Assist: HRSN Tracking, on the other hand, deploys natural language processing to identify health-related social needs, which are often factors in poor health outcomes. Providers can use these insights, delivered at the point of care, to plan more targeted interventions — and, on a larger scale, collect data across their communities to see what barriers to access and demographic-specific challenges they can help tackle.
On top of these tools, providers can integrate client experience surveys, claims data, and operational insights directly into a platform like Cx360 to understand where opportunities exist to further elevate their quality improvement efforts.
4. Review Quality Measure Data Regularly for Ongoing Advancements
CCBHCs are required to submit reports to their state and to SAMHSA on a yearly basis, and that data will inform billing structures, bonus payments, and operational needs for the following year.
But don’t wait until the submission deadline to review your quality measure data. Instead, establish monthly, quarterly, and yearly data review sessions to evaluate what you’ve collected through your AI-powered infrastructure and advanced EHR. Embed data review processes directly into your regular workflows. Doing so will help you refine your quality improvement initiatives and help you meet reporting requirements.
5. Benchmark Your Performance for Optimal Results
Like CCBHCs, states are required to collect and report on key data like substance use disorder and mental health records to inform continuous quality improvement. This robust statewide data can play a significant role in helping CCBHCs benchmark their performance.
With a combination of individual clinic data and statewide insights — for example, on hospitalization, pharmacotherapy, or readmission rates — you can get a bird’s-eye view of the CCBHC landscape. As part of your regular data review sessions, assess benchmark data and evaluate your clinic’s performance against these insights.
Making the Most of Your Data and Intelligent Technology
Using an EHR and solutions driven by AI to gather complete, accurate data from multiple sources is just the first part of your journey to superior-quality care and operations. What you do with the insights you put together can make all the difference.
To get the most value from this information, implement a continuous quality improvement process. Healthcare practices follow this practice for many reasons, including reducing costs, minimizing client wait times, increasing volumes, reducing manual errors, and boosting client satisfaction.
According to one study, this process should include:
- defining areas in need of improvement;
- benchmarking performance in those areas against other clinics;
- setting a goal for improvement; and
- establishing and iterating on projects until you achieve that goal.
Your continuous quality improvement strategy should be unique to your clinic’s data. If you’ve identified specific, population level unmet HRSN, for example, put processes in place to better support clients within those populations. If the data shows communication inefficiencies, use collaboration tools in your EHR platform to share information and insights more effectively with psychiatric rehabilitation centers, mental health records holders, and other DCOs.
The key to continuous quality improvement is pinpointing precisely what needs to be enhanced within your specific context. The Cx360 platform and Core Solutions’ other AI-backed tools can give your CCBHC the keen insights and timely data needed to conduct this process effectively and efficiently.
Request a demo to learn more about what the Cx360 platform can do for your CCBHC.
