Beacon Mental Health Uses Data Dashboard to Simplify Information Access

Tri-County Mental Health Services began in 1990, to provide safety-net services to Clay, Platte and Ray Counties in Missouri in the areas of mental and behavioral health, and substance use disorders. In 2023, Tri-County Mental Health Services changed its name to Beacon Mental Health.

As the Northland region has grown, so has Beacon. To serve a diverse clientele in urban, suburban and rural settings, Beacon has developed a unique provider network allowing the agency to deliver convenient, cost-effective services to over 9,000 people each year.

Challenge

Beacon Mental Health's primary focus is on delivering care for the 9,000+ people it serves each year. The agency aggregates data from its myAvatar CareRecord to report on compliance measures and analyze services by factors such as age, diagnosis and location of clients.

“Even simple requests such as how many clients we have in a zip code involved an ad hoc request and required valuable IT and team resources,” said Tom Petrizzo, chief executive officer at Beacon Mental Health. “We needed a way to get usable information faster and more efficiently.”

Solution

Beacon Mental Health implemented KPI Dashboards, an analytic solution that pulls information from the CareRecord and provides visualizations of clinical, financial and operational data.

“Netsmart had approached us previously about becoming an Edge Partner for other solutions, but none really fit our needs,” Petrizzo commented. “With KPI Dashboards, we could immediately see the value of the ability to visualize and operationalize data.”

In less than one minute, I had what I needed – how many clients, diagnoses and other useful information.

Tom Petrizzo, Chief Executive Officer, Beacon Mental Health

Results

Using KPI Dashboards frees the Beacon Mental Health IT staff from ad hoc report requests and gives staff easy, convenient access to the information they need.

“I was preparing for a meeting with one of our community partners and I wanted specifics about the care we’re providing in that area,” Petrizzo explained. “In less than one minute, I had what I needed – how many clients, ages, diagnoses and other useful information.”

KPI Dashboards builds metrics-based visualizations of a broad aggregated clinical, operational and financial data set, allowing these views to be widely available to staff. For example, KPI Dashboards allows users to segment the clients they serve by comorbidities, medication use, payer type and other variables.

Beacon Mental Health uses KPI Dashboards to guide grant writing, produce reports for the foundations that support Beacon Mental Health, and to give program managers specifics about the areas for which they are responsible. Since KPI Dashboards is integrated with myAvatar, accessing the data views is easy and efficient.

“Netsmart has been easy to work with,” said Christie Holm, Chief Quality and Compliance Officer. “We’ve made suggestions for ways to make the solution more beneficial to us and they made the changes. They’re very open to feedback.”

The Netsmart team continues to work with Beacon Mental Health to discover more ways to use the solution. For example, KPI Dashboards can offer broad-based views of the type and frequency of services provided to clients that will be involved in emerging value-based care models, such as the Certified Community Behavioral Health Clinic (CCBHC) program.