by Mike Lardieri, LCSW on August 6, 2024
The importance of treating individuals’ mental and emotional health alongside their physical condition has never been emphasized more than in recent years. However, heightened care needs and expectations have exposed gaps in existing care models. In response, certified community behavioral health clinics (CCBHCs) have arisen to offer more complete, accessible, cost-effective, and high-quality care.
The efficacy of these facilities hinges not only on the performance of providers and staff, but also the efficiency of the workflows they use to adequately meet CCBHC requirements, which demand strong care coordination, availability of services, quality reporting, and more.
An advanced and comprehensive electronic health record (EHR) can help optimize how CCBHCs deliver, directly or through partnerships with designated collaborating organizations (DCOs), the nine essential services they’re responsible for.
The 9 Required CCBHC Services — and Technology That Can Bolster Them
While these requirements enable providers to minimize barriers to access and reduce care disparities, they also pose operational challenges. How can a clinic offer effective crisis services, for example, without the technology to quickly deploy emergency support? How can a provider offer individualized care without first knowing a client’s unique needs?
By streamlining processes and enabling providers to spend more time with clients, an EHR designed for behavioral health provides the technological infrastructure needed to deliver on CCBHC requirements.
Specialized Services
According to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), four of the nine required CCBHC services focus on specialized care for mental health conditions and substance use disorders:
- Crisis services,including 24/7 crisis prevention, management, and follow-up services, as well as education on crisis planning, advanced directives, and accessing hotlines like the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline
- Outpatient treatment for mental health and substance use needs, tailored to each client’s age, life situation, and cultural context (delivered directly or through a DCO)
- Psychiatric rehabilitation services, which provide pathways to rehabilitation services that promote positive social-emotional and educational development
- Peer family support and counselor services, which make peer specialists, recovery coaches, counselors, and family support available to all clients and caregivers
How an Advanced EHR Platform Can Help
The latest impact report from the National Council of Mental Well-Being notes that CCBHCs are currently serving more than 3 million clients in these specialized areas, and 80% are working with 988 call centers to facilitate crisis work.
Given the importance and reach of these services, providers need an EHR like Core Solutions’ Cx360 platform to complete this work optimally and appropriately. The platform enables coordinated, real-time care tracking, analytics, and crisis team deployment that can enhance both crisis and outpatient care. Providers can create their own workflows to streamline operations, allowing them to spend more and better-quality time with clients in need.
Through the Cx360 platform, providers can also establish risk scores based on specific risk factors. The system then tracks those scores and supplies a flag to providers, which is always available on the client’s face sheet. In crisis situations, this feature enables providers to efficiently identify and triage high-risk clients.
For rehabilitation and outpatient treatment, the platform’s powerful work engine walks providers through evidence-based practices and monitors medication dispensing, prescription refills, and follow-up scheduling to help clients stay on track with their treatment and support programs. In-platform communication helps providers efficiently and effectively coordinate services across the care continuum.
Cx360 also supports others who care for clients, including family members, professional caretakers, and providers in other specialties. Via Core’s integrated Client Portal, all approved caregivers — and only those approved by the client — can access client schedules, assessments, and treatment plans to stay aligned, and family members can connect with counselors to receive their own support.
Person-Centered Support
The work of CCBHCs, along with the need to meet CCBHC requirements, have helped reduce barriers that marginalized populations often face when accessing behavioral healthcare. The National Council of Mental Well-Being found that 75% of CCBHCs have increased their outreach to historically underrepresented clients.
This impact has largely been driven by the CCBHC requirements for person-centered support, including:
- Person- and family-centered treatment planning, in which CCBHCs partner with families and caregivers and use data gathered through initial evaluations to create individualized treatment plans that address each client’s unique needs
- Community-based mental healthcare for veterans, requiring CCBHCs to offer recovery-oriented, culturally competent behavioral health services utilizing a principal behavioral health provider who maintains regular contact, reviews medication, and coordinates treatment plans
- Targeted case management, which is a safety net for clients at high risk of self-harm or overdose that sees CCBHCs go beyond baseline care coordination to help these clients transition to emergency departments, psychiatric hospitals, or residential centers
Cx360 includes features that enable providers to truly place clients and their families at the center of care. Self-service tools allow clients to refill medications, schedule appointments, and review assessments, while single logins provide families and caregivers with transparent access to their loved one’s medical records.
The platform’s advanced machine learning analytics help providers identify social determinants of health (SDOH) and population risk to better allocate resources across demographics and pinpoint individual needs to create tailored care plans.
More than 4 million veterans currently reside in rural areas. Cx360’s telehealth capabilities give them a potentially new way to access behavioral healthcare and services that were previously inaccessible. Clients can easily schedule and participate in telehealth appointments, and the dual-function interfaces allow providers to engage with clients while taking notes.
Implementing targeted case management — particularly during crisis situations — requires providers to collaborate efficiently. With multiple ways to coordinate across approved providers, Cx360 enables the quick communication and information-sharing required to address urgent needs in personalized ways.
Proactive and Prolonged Care
Within the CCBHC model, providers don’t just focus on in-clinic care, but also on prevention, screening, and post-care interventions and monitoring, primarily through two service requirements:
- Outpatient primary care screening and monitoring, including the implementation of procedures to better ensure all clients receive screenings for chronic diseases and common health conditions and the monitoring and facilitation of access to primary care services, laboratory testing, and specialty care
- Screening, diagnosis, and risk assessment, conducted for all clients in a timely manner and in alignment with clients’ language and literacy levels
How an Advanced EHR Platform Can Help
CCBHC providers are trained to assess and support their clients holistically. They can do this faster and more accurately with Core Solutions’ AI-powered tracking tools. These tools monitor a client’s symptoms and connect these symptoms to associated diagnoses, enabling providers to more quickly screen for and address underlying conditions. This advanced technology also allows providers to identify health-related social needs on the fly directly from staff member notes.
By predicting outcomes using machine learning algorithms and putting individual client symptoms in the context of population health data, Core Solutions’ AI tools help providers pinpoint diagnoses, assess risk accurately, and make informed treatment and monitoring decisions.
A Model for Change
The innovative CCBHC model was designed to help ensure that anyone who needs coordinated behavioral healthcare can access it, regardless of their age, identity, or background — and it’s already delivering on that promise.
With a comprehensive EHR like Cx360, providers can optimize their work to better serve their clients and continue ushering in the future of behavioral healthcare.
Contact us today to learn more about how the Cx360 platform can help your organization better meet CCBHC requirements.
