Outreach leverages data tool to gain insight into actionable analytics

More data leads to more informed decisions: Success story for behavioral health

About Outreach

Outreach populates eight behavioral health outpatient sites and four residential sites, with nearly 200 clinicians among those locations. Serving more than 5,000 clients per year, the New York-based agency provides a wide variety of treatments and programs, including drug and alcohol services. Outreach knew the value of better understanding the populations they serve as well as using measurements to help adjust services and operational approaches based on needs.

Gaining access to meaningful data

Finding success in a value-based payment model requires provider organizations to not only have access to data but the ability to easily understand and leverage the analytics. If an organization is unable to quickly comprehend and use data to their advantage, then the metrics will never come to life in a meaningful way. Outreach wanted to find a way to both efficiently gather actionable data and use those analytics to both drive decisions and measure outcomes in order to better serve their client community.

“We wanted to use meaningful data for basic demographic exploration, payment trends, addressing potential gaps in care, as well as other elements of our operation,” Director of Quality and Information Kelsey Silver, LMFT said. “Then we could use that data to show us where we’re successful and areas we need to work on, which is essential with value-based payment.”

We wanted to use meaningful data for basic demographic exploration, payment trends, addressing potential gaps in care, as well as other elements of our operation.

Kelsey Silver, LMFT, Director of Quality and Information

In order to gain access to actionable and easy-toread data, Outreach implemented Netsmart KPI Dashboards. The data analytics solution tracks key performance indicators (KPIs) and offers a simple yet dynamic visualization for users to efficiently measure clinical, operational and financial metrics. Outreach is able to create configured sheets and dashboards to help leadership and clinicians target insights based on programs, service types, consumer access to care and more. A daily performance dashboard visualization allows users to measure successes, view areas for improvement, and analyze services and populations, all at a glance.

Data tailored to organizational needs

Outreach serves as a trauma-informed agency, therefore it’s vital they fully understand and have accurate, up-to-date information on clients. Silver noted that a large number of their women’s day program clients have experienced trauma, however they know that trauma exposure spans throughout their continuum and is not limited to one demographic.

In order to better identify trauma exposure in a more informed approach, Outreach created a trauma screen dashboard within KPI that allows users to see differing populations and respective experiences, whether a trauma screen was completed before or after a psychiatric assessment, and PTSD diagnosis, among other metrics. KPI Dashboards helped them identify several new populations and sites that didn’t initially have visibility into their high concentration of trauma exposed clients, and some sites that didn’t have as many diagnoses as expected. By drilling down data based on organization specific settings, Outreach was able to better understand both the operational and clinical standings for trauma treatment. This allowed the organization to set new guidelines and programs to better serve complex populations who weren’t always receiving tailored services necessary for recovery.

Easy visualizations within KPI makes it possible to see where things need to be quickly switched to addressed, which is a must during a volatile situation like COVID.

Kelsey Silver, LMFT, Director of Quality and Information

Addressing operational and financial stability

In addition to trauma-informed care, Outreach leveraged KPI Dashboards amid the pandemic. As with many provider organizations, COVID-19 posed a threat to the financial and operational stability of Outreach. In order to determine what their collections or incoming revenue was pre and post-COVID, Outreach started looking at where the differences stood. They needed to visualize client census, services performed and reimbursement for those services. Through KPI Dashboards, Silver and staff were able to see where they needed to expand services to meet new needs as well as determine reasons for differing reimbursement rates. This allowed Outreach to reorganize services and prompted them to adjust billing policies and service codes for sites conducting virtual care.

“Easy visualizations within KPI makes it possible to see where things need to be quickly switched to addressed, which is a must during a volatile situation like COVID,” Silver said.

Assessing staff engagement based on analytics

Staff engagement is another critical piece of successful care delivery. If clinicians aren’t satisfied or performing to the best of their ability, it’s important for leadership to be aware so they can better support staff in need or address potential gaps in service delivery. In order assess clinical engagement and performance, Outreach created a sheet within KPI Dashboards to track percentages of successful discharges based on a clinician. If the discharge rate stood below agency average, leadership could reach out to the clinician and see why.

In some cases, if a staff member had a poor discharge rate it was because they were struggling with cancelations and no-shows. Another staff member who was showing poor discharge rates was working with a lot of justice-involved individuals, making discharge look a little different in the dashboard. This allowed Outreach to change the clinician’s metrics regarding community reentry to better fit her clientele. Having a bird’s eye view of operational performance allows Outreach to better understand potential barriers clinicians face that affect successful discharge rates. Access to these metrics gives leadership the opportunity to implement changes or new standards to better support staff engagement and performance.

Staff involvement is key

When beginning to leverage data and configure sheets for specific needs, it is important stakeholders within the organization participate in the KPI process. Clinicians, leadership and staff can decipher the information they want from the data analytics solution and then work with KPI Dashboards liaison to build the sheet together. This gives the staff ownership of the data rather than telling them what they needed or what they’re going to get from KPI Dashboards.

“By having the users actually participate in building the product, they have a significant amount of ownership over the chosen sheets,” Silver said. “I would hold weekly office hours and training where we would build the KPI together. If they don’t care about the data they are given, then it’s useless. By involving them initially, they feel more inclined to use the solution because it’s the information most applicable to what they want.”

Unlike many data analytics tools, KPI Dashboards allows users to uniquely configure content for their own organizational needs. With less robust tools, staff often have trouble understanding or interpreting data because the display is cumbersome or confusing to digest. This can lead to skeptics and an inability to leverage data. With KPI Dashboards, users can get the exact metric they’re looking for and effortlessly comprehend it through an easy-to-read visualization, eliminating any distrust or frustration.

“Once I show the data through the solution, I am able to instill trust from our executives,” Silver said. “Then, there becomes an inherit trust in KPI. They let go of their hesitancy and allow themselves to have full trust in the data to help drive improvements and efficiencies throughout Outreach.”