As individuals make their way through outpatient care, measuring treatment success outcomes has proven difficult. Fragmented care throughout a patient’s behavioral health journey has become a key concern for clinicians, often leaving them unable to fully document treatment progress.
With little data being collected during and after treatment, patients cannot be tracked for the efficacy of services, Tammer Atallah, executive clinical director of the behavioral health clinical program at Salt Lake City-based Intermountain Health told Becker’s.
“We don’t ensure that the care — the therapies, the medicines — are actually, in a more broader sense, improving patients’ lives to the degree that they’re demonstrated in randomized control trials,” Mr. Atallah said.
While disorder-specific questionnaires are standard to report patient outcomes in behavioral health, measurable outcomes remain scarce. Intermountain has developed an outcome questionnaire to provide real-time feedback to the patient and provider about progress.
“We don’t have a blood test to see whether you’re depressed or not,” Mr. Atallah said.
Wearable technology has been integrated across specialties, from cardiovascular care to sleep medicine, but is slowly being integrated into behavioral health services with significant room for growth, he said.
A baseline must be established followed by regular testing to ensure progress throughout the treatment process, he said. This data can inform individual care and highlight population-level trends and areas for improvement.
Payers and providers
“It’s not fair to be asking for more money, more money, more money, when we don’t know whether people are getting better or not,” Mr. Atallah said.
The fragmented nature of upstream care and the gap between treatment efficacy and real-world outcomes remains a concern regarding funding and reimbursement, he said. Without measurable success outcomes, payers become more hesitant to cover costs.
This increases accountability on both payer and provider side, he said. Implementing systemic outcome measures give payers confidence in the quality of care provided — not just access to the service. It also allowed providers to differentiate themselves in the market, Mr. Atallah said.
Crisis care
“How do you manage this healthcare system that’s been traditionally driving margins in the hospital by a transactional sort of environment to this notion of value based care where we’re really wanting to encourage and incentivize proactive care?” he said.
The national emphasis on crisis care has led behavioral health down a path where proactivity is no longer a core focus, Atallah said. Economics work better to have a sustainable business model on the crisis side of the equation as opposed to people never having a crisis.
“We’re not really good at treating them when they get really sick, because right now, the incentives are aligned to actually do that, which is why you see behavioral health in the current environment.”
Intermountain Healthcare serves communities across Utah, Idaho, Nevada, Colorado, Montana and Wyoming. The system operates 33 hospitals and 400 clinics, and serves more than 3 million patients through telehealth.
