Children's Health Council III
Organization
Founded in 1953, Children’s Health Council (CHC) serves children and teens in the Bay Area with behavioral, emotional, developmental, and learning challenges. CHC’s mission is to remove barriers to learning in order to help children and teens become resilient, happy, and successful at home, at school, and in life. CHC serves more than 2,000 families per year in its schools and through its clinical services, and another 3,000 individuals participate in its community education classes and workshops.
Situation
CHC’s clinical services division provides therapy and evaluation services to over 2,000 children, adolescents, young adults, and their families each year. Due to the increase in mental health challenges facing youth, the need for CHC’s clinical services is growing rapidly. To keep pace with this demand, CHC needed to better understand its business and how well it is meeting the needs of these youth and the community at large.
Project Objectives
Define a set of business metrics for CHC’s Private Pay Clinical Services division that informs the business, measures performance, supports strategic and tactical decisions, and demonstrates CHC success in meeting the needs of the community through clinical services.
Project Overview
The project included:
- Discovery of current practices and operational issues, existing processes and systems, organizational and cultural readiness, and performance challenges arising from rapid growth over the past two years.
- Development of key operational, clinical outcome and financial metrics, with business definitions to support data governance.
- Identification of opportunities and requirements to align with implementation of the Electronic Health Record system (EHR) that CHC is migrating to this year.
- Research and advice on utilization benchmarks (efficiency) and industry practices in clinical outcome measurement.
- Socialization of metric design and use with principal participants across Private Pay Clinic Management and the CFO/COO with final recommendations presented to the CHC Executive Director and Staff.
Key Recommendations
The ACT team recommended the following:
- A list of 42 metrics for Executive Dashboard, Clinic Management and Ad Hoc analytics covering client experience and acquisition, financials, net pricing, and clinician utilization (efficiency).
- A step-by-step approach and advice for developing and implementing Clinical Outcomes measurement unique to CHC, given industry research confirmation that there is no standard set of metrics
- Use of a provided framework to understand and tradeoff needs for investment, shift in culture, and implementation execution, to determine how to roll out metrics in operational workflows and in the new EHR in sync with its Go-live timeline.