by Mike Lardieri, LCSW on October 1, 2024
The certified community behavioral health clinic (CCBHC) model has grown significantly since its inception, with CCBHCs now serving 3 million people, according to the National Council for Mental Wellbeing
As that number of clients grows, CCBHC providers face increasingly complex operational challenges that can hinder the high-quality care they’re tasked with offering and delivering. CCBHCs must contend with multifaceted workstreams, new and more varied client needs, and complicated care coordination with their designated collaborating organizations (DCOs).
The operational burdens CCBHCs face can impact not only care quality and outcomes, but also providers’ productivity, wellbeing, and satisfaction. With an electronic health record (EHR) tailored to the behavioral health space, providers and staff can better access the tools they need to perform at their best while reducing or eliminating work that can add to stress and potentially lead to turnover.
Here are five ways an advanced EHR enhances staff’s work.
1. It Reduces Workloads — and Burnout
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 46% of healthcare staff felt burned out often or very often in 2022, up from 32% in 2018. What’s contributing to these troubling numbers? Increased caseloads, case severity, and concern about the widespread healthcare labor shortage, among other factors.
Today’s providers have more to do and less time to do it, resulting in providers spending more time on operational duties than ever before. In fact, a Doximity survey found that 75% of providers feel that reducing their administrative loads would meaningfully decrease burnout.
While the CCBHC model has enabled 98% of clinics to hire additional staff to help spread out this workload, according to the National Council for Mental Wellbeing, the increasing number of individuals under their care often adds to existing needs.
By providing CCBHCs with a centralized and customizable hub for all things client management, the right EHR can save providers time, reduce their workloads, and help cut burnout rates.
Take EHRs’ self-service features, for example. Rather than dedicating staff to answering client questions or scheduling visits, CCBHCs can offer clients self-service medication refills, appointment scheduling, and visit reminders, as well as the ability to review provider notes on their own time and get answers to pressing concerns from AI-powered chatbots. On the other side of the care equation, mobile capabilities allow providers to securely access charts and progress notes remotely and without having to make a return visit to the office.
These features — set within intuitive, easy-to-use interfaces — help minimize the administrative burden on CCBHC staff. This can allow them to spend more and better-quality time with clients or leave work at reasonable times that can contribute to an improved work-life balance and strengthen staff retention.
2. It Supports Clinical Decision-Making
For behavioral health professionals, there’s usually nothing more important than client care. And CCBHCs are designed to target that care to particular demographics and individuals. The National Council for Mental Wellbeing, for example, found that 81% of CCBHCs screen for unmet social needs and 75% target outreach to underrepresented populations.
The right EHR can bolster these efforts by providing the data and insights needed to enhance client care. Machine learning analytics tools, for example, scan massive population-based data sets to identify health-related social needs and help providers allocate resources effectively.
Through an EHR, CCBHC providers can create custom risk factor protocols, which the system will track to identify potential concerns. From there, the EHR can also connect that data to possible diagnoses, aiding providers’ clinical decision-making. The best EHRs for a mental health or substance use disorder professional to consider also create custom dashboards with intuitive data visualizations that provide additional insights for monitoring client progress and treatment adherence.
Tools like these not only boost the quality of community behavioral health services, which can improve staff satisfaction with their work, but they also save providers time, enable more precise decision-making, and reduce human error that can harm outcomes.
3. It Optimizes Workflows
CCBHCs often partner with DCOs — including law enforcement agencies, community behavioral health services, substance use disorder professionals, rehabilitation services, and other facilities, providers, and local organizations — to help ensure clients get the best care possible.
As a clinic’s network of DCOs expands, they increasingly require effective communication and collaboration to successfully see clients through each step of their care journey. EHR solutions can better ensure no client gets lost in a CCBHC’s complex system.
CCBHC providers can use their EHR to create bespoke workflows that ensure care continuity and streamline operations across all DCOs in their network. By setting custom permissions, leaders can give each DCO user only what they specifically need, ultimately improving team members’ efficiency and productivity.
What’s more, EHRs provide keen insights into areas like caseloads, time management, billing procedures, and provider productivity. With this data, clinics can find and address service and efficiency gaps to optimize their operations and staff responsibilities.
4. It Keeps Everyone on the Same Page
Within complex CCBHC and DCO networks, data- and information-sharing is key. Providers often must exchange information quickly, particularly in crisis situations.
Fortunately, an EHR offers in-platform communication channels that make collaboration easy and effective. Providers can use text, web chat, or video calls to collaborate with different offices or directly with clients, enabling timely communication at every step. With these capabilities, providers can share learnings, connect on client needs, and offer professional feedback to boost care.
Many EHRs also have scheduling capabilities that allow CCBHCs and DCOs to coordinate calendars and appointments based on provider and bed availability. In addition, real-time access to treatment plans, assessment results, and more gives everyone the most accurate data possible.
5. It Helps Staff Stay Current
EHR alerts benefit both clients and CCBHCs. On the client side, custom notifications alert individuals to upcoming appointments, medication reminders, and progress updates. This information can reduce the number of inquiries a clinic receives by answering client questions proactively, and it can contribute to lower no-show rates.
On the provider side, secure EHR alerts keep CCBHCs and DCOs up to date on clients’ treatment plans — no matter where the provider is or how they access the platform. Many EHRs even offer regulatory monitoring, providing alerts for billing, data privacy, and other compliance requirements.
These alerts do the heavy lifting for CCBHCs, keeping everyone involved in a client’s plan informed via accurate, secure reporting while reducing the stress that can come with uncertainty about a client’s journey and progress.
Integrated Tools for Smoother Community Behavioral Health Services
Strengthening clinical operations is all about embedding the right tools in the right places. This is one of the many areas where Core Solutions’ Cx360 platform shines.
This advanced EHR integrates directly into a clinic’s existing systems, reducing the necessary learning curve, and giving providers seamless workflows. It offers key data to optimize both internal productivity and the quality of client care, helping elevate staff satisfaction with their work and their ability to deliver great outcomes.
The Cx360 platform is a robust tool that covers all areas of an effective clinic — billing, clinical care, client communication, provider collaboration, and much more — within an intuitive central source of truth.
Contact us today to see how Cx360 can strengthen your clinic’s operations.
