OUACHITA BEHAVIORAL HEALTH AND WELLNESS | CHALLENGES

Ouachita Behavioral Health and Wellness (OBHAW), a nonprofit community mental health facility for five counties surrounding its Hot Springs, Arkansas headquarters, takes a “collaborative, whole-person approach to behavioral health care that will help people in our communities to heal.” With teams dedicated to helping every individual find a path to healing that fits them, OBHAW works to seek out and continue services and programs that help bring hope and health to each person within the communities it serves.

Awarded an expansion grant to deliver Certified Community Behavioral Health Clinic services (CCBHC), OBHAW needed an EHR platform that integrates clinical documentation, billing, and claims for their newly expanding range of programs and services. CCBHCs require evidence-based best practices, capabilities to track and report outcomes, and coordinated care. OBHAW  would be designing new workflows and processes, while elevating its level of data driven-decision making to meet CCBHC reporting requirements.

SOLUTION 

OBHAW chose the CareLogic EHR platform to build its future on. The implementation effort supported new and enhanced workflows and processes under the CCBHC designation, with increased staff and services, including crisis care, care coordination, expanded referrals, and additional steps toward its existing mission of whole person care.

REMOTE IMPLEMENTATION SUCCESS 

Standing up the CareLogic EHR during a remotely managed implementation process had unexpected benefits for the OBHAW team. “Using the virtual setup for meetings got everyone together in one place at one time more easily,” said Susan Smith, OBHAW Chief Operating Officer. “There was less coordination and planning to get people together for work sessions. We just dialed in, with the right people in the right place at the right time.”

CCBHC PROGRAM AND SERVICES SETUP SUCCESS 

“We have stood up new services, new processes, hired 15 new staff for new positions, added an ACT team, added care coordination to our services, and we are moving toward an integrated care model for behavioral health and physical health, to reduce lapses in treatment for people with comorbidities,” Smith said. “Behavioral health and primary care teams each know what is going on with the people on their caseloads, and they can review what services are needed and how to provide them.”

“CCBHC services require significant usage of evidence-based practices, and the outcomes metrics, reporting, and data analysis to quantify the trends seen,” said Mary Givens, Senior Product Compliance Manager for Qualifacts. “OBHAW understands the demands, and their CareLogic implementation supports their CCBHC programs and services by capturing and making visible the information they need.”

“To deliver its expanded CCBHC programs and services, OBHAW selected CareLogic as an EHR platform whose implementation team is familiar with the requirements and nuances of the specific requirements for both  the original demonstration grants and for the subsequent expansion grants,” said Robert Patton, Vice President of Implementation Services for Qualifacts. “We worked together to position OBHAW for success with documenting and billing for their new services, and for remapping and reenvisioning existing programs.”

CLINICAL DOCUMENTATION SUCCESS IN ARKANSAS

“The CareLogic implementation team worked with us collaboratively to develop solutions that best align with the agency’s processes and workflows. The team stood out for understanding the whole picture for what we need, and how to make it work best. We felt like the team understood what we’re talking about,” Smith said. “We are now able to track documents signed for timely completion, and better understand task completion, productivity, direct hours of service, and other key data that helps us maximize our resources to provide the best care for the most people.”

OUTCOMES, COMPLIANCE, DATA-DRIVEN DECISION MAKING AND ORGANIZATIONAL  SUCCESS

OBHAW is planning to report its CareLogic EHR clinical and organizational performance data through the MACRA Federal Quality Payment Program, and is looking forward to a positive result when the reporting date comes. “We will have the tools we need to make the right decisions that lead to the outcomes we need to show,” Smith said. “The graphs that are available to visualize progress give us real time results to understand outcomes, either during a session or before or after.”

BILLING, CLAIMS, AND RM SUCCESS

“With our CareLogic implementation wrapping up, we are gaining the full benefits of the EHR platform, and we have significantly improved over where we were across the organization, on billing, claims, and clinical efficiency and productivity,” said Kris Curtis, Director of Business Administration. “We are billing more quickly than we were. We have greater visibility into outstanding items, and our integration with our general ledger and accounting platform is significantly improved over where we were previously. Denials are down, clean and validated claims have eliminated the amount of cleanup we were doing, and our frontend processes have improved.”

ABOUT OUACHITA BEHAVIORAL HEALTH AND WELLNESS

Ouachita Behavioral Health and Wellness (OBHAW) is the nonprofit community mental health facility for five surrounding counties in Arkansas. People receive services in one of our five locations, located in Hot Springs, Malvern, Arkadelphia, Glenwood, and Mt Ida. We see over 5,551 clients per year, half of whom have a serious mental illness. Current estimates indicate that 83% of those we serve are low to moderate-income, with 61% being on Medicaid.

ABOUT QUALIFACTS

Qualifacts is one of the largest behavioral health and human services EHR vendors in the country. Its mission is to partner with customers to support and extend their ability to deliver quality care and improve the lives of the clients they serve. With more than 20 years of experience its products and services help customers achieve interoperability goals, optimize efficiency, improve productivity, and maximize reimbursement. The company offers several EHRs – CareLogic, Credible and InSync – while collaborating to build an even brighter future for partner agencies and their clients.