SAE’s PI&S Division builds client capacity of the behavioral health and health workforce across clinical and non-clinical, community-based settings. We offer hands-on solutions (needs assessment alignment, training process evaluation, process mapping for workflow optimization, root cause analysis for eliminating waste and redundancy, logic modeling for getting to outcomes) to improve interdisciplinary team performance.
Are We Measuring The Right Things To Show Progress Toward Improving Patient Care?”
If your behavioral health team has asked this question, here are a few tips for CHOOSING INDICATORS:
Work with your stakeholders to define indicators (measurable pieces of information that show something about implementation).
For example, ‘Through two on-line trainings, we prepared 80 providers to interpret patient scores on an inventory.’
How would the team know the providers are adequately prepared to interpret scores? This is critical for providers to make appropriate referrals, identify therapies, and support optimal care coordination. There are several indicators for the team to collect, based on this statement:
- Indicator 1: Numbers of providers who attended trainings.
- Indicator 2: Percentage of delivered (versus planned) session content dealing with score interpretation.
- Indicator 3: Percentage of providers who showed they acquired necessary knowledge.
Choosing Indicators (Cont’d)
These points may seem easy or difficult, depending on your team’s experiences with planning performance measures, data collection, evaluation, or related activities. Here are a few additional guidelines that are helpful for ‘beginners’ and ‘experts’ alike:
- Before agreeing on indicators, ensure they don’t impose a data burden on participants (those supplying the data.) Collaborate with stakeholders to share data across organization when possible.
- Ensure indicators are unambiguous. They should serve as meaningful and accurate representations of targeted variables.
PI&S MISSION
“To provide innovative solutions to behavioral health teams as they improve efficiencies and expand care pathways across social systems.”
The mission of SAE’s Performance Improvement & Sustainability (PI&S) focuses on the critical link between building integrated behavioral health assets to sustain care access points, reducing client barriers across the Social Determinants of Health, https://health.gov/healthypeople/priority-areas/social-determinants-health.
The PI&S arm of SAE seeks to help you optimize efficiencies along with new and future changes in federal and state payment streams such as Medicaid and expansions to community-based programs, ensuring the ability to deliver care to clients facing life adversities impacting their Social Determinants of Health (SDOH).
We work with our clients to: apply structured methodologies across functions (case management, screening and referrals, crisis intervention) to reduce waste, increase efficiency, and streamline critical processes, with an eye toward upholding a team’s own approved and existing frameworks (Primary Care Behavioral Health Model, Patient Centered Medical Home, Certified Community Behavioral Health Clinic, Other Integrated Behavioral Health approaches).
CONTACT US FOR A COMPLIMENTARY, INITIAL PI&S CONSULTATION
- Steven Estrine, Ph.D., President & CEO, SAE
- Julianne Manchester, Ph.D., LSSBB, Director, Performance Improvement & Sustainability, SAE
- Meetings are by appointment only.
📄 Click for the downloadable PDF.
