6 Ways Healthcare BI Is Reshaping Behavioral Health
In the evolving landscape of behavioral healthcare, Healthcare BI has emerged as a powerful enabler in the adoption of value-based care models, reshaping how organizations deliver services. This transition from fee-for-service to value-based reimbursement is a journey that demands innovative strategies and tools for success. Through Healthcare BI, behavioral health organizations are now equipped to achieve better client outcomes, reduce costs, and significantly enhance the overall quality of care.
Integrating BI tools with other healthcare technology, such as EHR systems, gives organizations the ability to collect, analyze, and visualize data so that they can monitor and measure quality and outcomes, and use those insights to fuel their value-based care approach—without requiring manual exporting and additional workload.
This article explores six ways organizations are using healthcare business intelligence to successfully support value-based care.
Identify High-Risk Clients and Tailor Care
In behavioral health, complex client populations, complicated diagnoses, and treatment plans that may span multiple providers over extended periods of time are common. This makes risk identification and stratification challenging. And for organizations that rely on manual data collection and analysis, exporting data from multiple sources into spreadsheets, it can prove nearly impossible.
The right Healthcare BI tools can make it easier to integrate and analyze vast amounts of client data, including medical history, social determinants of health, medication adherence, and treatment progress. By considering these factors, you can develop ways to stratify clients based on their risk levels. For example, individuals with a history of non-compliance with treatment plans or clients with complex diagnoses and treatment plans that may require more care coordination.
When you can identify high risk clients, you can tailor interventions to meet their unique needs. You might assign a care coordinator, create personalized treatment plans, or make sure that additional support and resources can be made readily available to the client and their support team.
Streamline Compliance and Reporting
For behavioral health organizations, the increased administrative burden of compliance and reporting to support value-based care can make adoption challenging. Using healthcare business intelligence solutions that are integrated into your EHR can dramatically reduce this burden, helping to ensure you’re meeting all compliance standards and streamlining the reporting process to reduce impact on your already overburdened administrative staff.
With BI tools, you can automate tracking of and reporting on compliance, making it easy to generate accurate compliance reports, audit trails, and security logs. You can track access to client data, monitor compliance with data protection policies. And critically for value-based care, you can create the reports you need to fulfill reporting obligations to regulatory bodies, accreditation agencies, and payers.
Improve Resource Allocation
Optimizing resource allocation is critical for providing efficient and cost-effective care, especially in the context of value-based care. And in behavioral health, where 53% of leaders cite staffing as their biggest challenge, the need for optimized resource allocation has never been more urgent. With BI tools, you can get the data-driven insights you need to optimize how your valuable resources are used, whether it’s for facilities, equipment, or personnel.
By using BI to analyze historical client data and service demand patterns, you can pinpoint inefficiencies, you can make informed decisions about resource allocation, reducing waste and optimizing costs. You might find, for example, that demand for specific services increases during certain times of the year or in specific service areas or facilities. By re-allocating personnel at peak times, you can ensure that personnel are being used efficiently and clients don’t have to wait for service, which can improve both satisfaction and outcomes.
Optimize Telehealth Delivery
Telehealth has become increasingly important in the delivery of behavioral healthcare, particularly in the context of value-based care. Behavioral health organizations can use BI tools to optimize their telehealth services, helping to ensure that care quality meets standards are met and to identify opportunities for improvements.
Data on client progress, treatment adherence, and satisfaction can identify where improvements can be made to telehealth services that will either reduce costs or improve outcomes. For instance, if certain modalities or platforms yield better outcomes, you might prioritize their use.
You can also use BI to identify clients who may benefit the most from telehealth services. For example, you may have clients in remote or underserved areas with limited access to in-person care, making them ideal candidates for telehealth services. By identifying these opportunities, you can expand the reach of your program to provide care to a broader population.
Improve Care Coordination Through a Unified View of Client Data
Behavioral health clients often receive care from multiple providers, including primary care physicians, specialists, therapists, and social workers. By enabling collaboration among care team members, BI tools can give all the stakeholders a unified view of client data, including comprehensive information about a client’s health and treatment history. A therapist can, for instance, review a client’s medication history and treatment progress, while the client’s primary care physician might review relevant mental health records to evaluate response to medical treatment. This shared view promotes the collaboration and care coordination that are so vital to value-based care and essential to improving costs while also increasing quality of care.
Increase Client Engagement
Engaged clients are more likely to adhere to treatment plans, actively participate in their care, and experience better outcomes. Many behavioral health organizations are finding that BI tools such as client dashboards can play a pivotal role in actively engaging clients in their own care.
Clients can use dashboards to track their progress, review treatment plans, and get personalized tips that can promote new behaviors and reinforce learnings. For example, a client with depression might check their dashboard to see a visualization of how their mood has changed over time, discover self-paced educational and training materials, get medication reminders, and check self-care tips. Empowered by these insights, clients can take an active role in their own treatment, and this can ultimately lead to improved health outcomes.
BI’s Essential Role in Value-based Care Success
BI offers versatile use cases to address the unique aspects of value-based care in behavioral health. These use cases reflect a data-driven approach to healthcare that not only benefits clients but also ensures the financial sustainability of behavioral health organizations.
As behavioral health leaders navigate the complex landscape of value-based care, BI tools, such as the BI capabilities that are integrated with Qualifacts EHR platforms, prove essential to success. By harnessing the power of data and analytics, organizations can not only meet the challenges of the changing healthcare landscape but also thrive in an environment that prioritizes quality, efficiency, and client-centered care.
