Behavioral health leaders are moving past dashboards and data overload to focus on solving clearly defined problems with actionable metrics. Four executives recently connected with Becker’s to share how their organization is using data to transform strategy.
Question: Behavioral health has historically lagged behind other specialties in data infrastructure and measurement. What does “data-driven decision-making” look like in your organization today, and what progress are you most proud of?
Editor’s note: Responses have been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Corey Cronrath, DO. Chief Medical Officer at Mental Health Cooperative (Nashville, Tenn.): In the last decade, the Mental Health Cooperative has reduced emergency department visits by 60% and inpatient admissions by 70%. A lot of this is the care model around social workers and care management, but the refinement to get that big of a reduction really took great data and organization of that data. And how did they do it? It was through examples of a psychiatrist bringing up that they’re noticing tardive dyskinesia patients coming out of the hospital on both an antipsychotic and an anticholinergic. That used to be a treatment, but it no longer is. We have the data internally to identify how many of our patients are on an anticholinergic and antipsychotic and have a diagnosis of part of dyskinesia. Then we can disseminate that out to those that are treating the patients to see if it is appropriate or not. Sometimes it’s a teaching moment, and other times it’s an appropriate treatment. But by knowing the data, you can actually make impact and decisions that are changing the outcomes and lives of our patients.
Tanmay Mathur. Vice President of Vanderbilt Psychiatric Hospital (Nashville, Tenn.): I would say for many of us, it’s not necessarily that there’s a lack of data. We’re inundated with data, with dashboards, with metrics. It’s about how do you extrapolate the right insights from this pool of information? For us, I found that it’s not necessarily starting with the data but taking a step back and clearly defining the problem that you’re trying to solve. Then understanding which pieces of data are going to help you with figuring out how to solve that problem. I think when you clearly define the problem, it allows you to attack it with a lot more clarity, and then you don’t get lost in pools and pools of information. To me, the point around data driven is clearly defining the problem. For example, we are always focused on decreasing turnaround times in our partnership emergency departments and getting behavioral health patients driving better throughput. We started with this problem but turnaround time means something different to everyone so clearly defining what part of the turnaround time we can impact and what metrics are we trying to clearly drive. That conversation was just as important as diving into the data.
Patricia McClure-Chessier. Chief Healthcare Executive Leader for Streamwood Behavioral Healthcare System (Streamwood, Ill.): We make the majority of our decisions, I would say off of our data. Data to us means to take action when you notice that your organization is not going in the direction that you want it to go in. For example, at one time, our readmission rates were high, and we know that readmissions can be very costly to the organization. We had to put an initiative in order to fix that and denial rates. We were paying attention to our denial rates — which were very high — and caused us to put an initiative in place. Another example I would give is patient satisfaction. If your patients are not satisfied, that is going to affect your referrals and the patient’s loyalty to your organization. We had to put a patient satisfaction initiative in place and change some things in regards to patient care. The last one is our reform referral sources. We had to make sure that we paid special attention to our referral sources so that we can continue to receive them. With that being said, we meet with our referrals and get referral sources feedback quarterly. They also have an open line of communication with our business development team, as well as myself. I go out to quarterly meetings for our referral sources, and we know that if our referral sources are not happy, that can also affect business.
Jill Wiedemann-West. CEO of People Incorporated Mental Health Services (Eagan, Minn.): I’m really acknowledging that there’s so much that we can all be looking at in our businesses. We obviously look at data-driven decisions, both in the administrative area, related to outliers, efficiencies, breakdowns in practice, etc., as well as clinical and looking at those outcomes. Those outcomes are related to how the client is experiencing the care. One of the things that really seems to be so important, given how many different areas you can look at, is really tying everything together. We basically decided that our data was going to drive our decisions about what we were going to look at over, our strategic cycle, meaning that we could change it every year. We could look every year at different tactics related to our data and our data was going to drive our strategy. We were going to tie that together with everything from our scorecard to our quality initiatives, our enterprise projects, including technology projects. We were going to look at how the budget then informed all of those areas. This was a really simple concept, but it actually ended up being really quite meaty for our organization. It allowed us to take all of our hundreds of employees and really focus them on a handful of initiatives that we wanted to grow and create better efforts over the next three year strategic cycle, and ensure we were measuring constantly year on year on how to continue to make those improvements. I think it’s been a really important part of how we get everyone to put all of their energy into one or two, or maybe there’s seven areas over the next several years and really turn those pages.
