The mental health and substance abuse treatment industry has a great advantage over other businesses.
Many years ago when I worked in radio, production/creative and administration/sales departments seemed to have a low-simmering, seldom acknowledged cold-war going on, similar to what can be found under the covers in some mental health and substance abuse treatment organizations’ business and clinical departments.
The tension is partly a matter of record-keeping in order to stay in business. An advantage in our field is that record-keeping is vital to both financial and treatment outcomes. If we examine the emotional payoffs, practitioners can get a charge out of seeing somebody get better, watching ongoing assessment scores improve and identifying the improvement as a result of treatment. On the business end, the payoff is displayed in the sigh of relief when the Office of the Medicaid Inspector General’s review doesn’t result in too many “Takeback” dollars due to inadequate documentation.
Which brings me to my point.
In the 1980’s radio stations hit the top of the bell curve for implementing computer systems to keep records that increased efficiency integrated magically successful programming and in some cases moved a person from an eliminated position to another, more valuable spot in the organization. Accounting became more efficient, proof of meeting FCC requirements was more easily producible, and a ton of other technologically inspired changes revolutionized the industry (they needed it with the decline of market share and advertising dollars for radio).
In the 1990’s mental health and substance abuse treatment organizations discovered the benefits of computers in a bigger way with the advent of the Electronic Medical Record (EMR). Nowadays people are upgrading or replacing their EMR. The new technology isn’t just about keeping notes and treatment plans and pushing records of service to billing programs. It’s easy to see the advantages of computerized billing. Just run a management report in a few minutes and remember how long it took to get that data before the report was available. The EMR adds an entirely different dimension: people in clinical and business departments are working together to succeed.
The new technology delivers business improvements that are sensitive to advancing both clinical and billing processes. The EMR can analyze a client’s ongoing outcomes assessments and deliver the information that OMIG wants simultaneously. The EMR can help identify suicidal tendencies during intake and record the requirement of investigation while alerting a specialist to see a client before he gets out the door that day. The EMR can make mergers and acquisitions more effective with less work by integrating data from two different computer systems…which used to be a major problem due to lack of data standardization.
Few will argue about the effectiveness of implementing new technology. The most significant issues are budgeting the upgrade or purchase and allocating the human energy to do that.
Let me know if you need help, info@ehrsio.com.
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