Evaluating Behavioral Health Data Reporting and Outcomes

The Challenge

  • Most existing behavioral health quality measures and metrics do not focus on high-need and high-cost populations
  • Behavioral health (BH) quality measurement lacks clear accountability across government
  • At all levels of the health system, organizations rely on multiple funding streams to manage and deliver BH care, resulting in high reporting burdens

The Opportunity

  1. Work with CMS leadership to outline accountable and responsible parties for tracking behavioral health outcomes and or care quality measures for CMS providers and enrollees;
  2. Support Offices With Behavioral Health Metric Maturity with Assessment and Behavioral Health Data Inventory;
  3. Explore a population-level dashboard when policy goals, ownership and data sources are more clear.

The Process

Understanding Data

As team lead, I assessed the landscape of the behavioral health outcome measurement. I designed a rough logic model attempting to breakdown key performance indicators for behavioral health outcomes identified by the CMS Behavioral Health Steering Committee. I identified the goals, objectives, agency and external champions, outputs, proposed metrics, and potential data sources.

I referenced this logic model frequently when engaging with leadership across the agency, increasing buy-in for this endeavor.

Facilitating Workshops

I facilitated 60 minute co-creation sessions with 10+ senior policy advisors and front office staff.

The questions were intentionally broad to better understand what would be top of mind for participants.

The answers were to seed a second workshop with data-focused subject matter experts as participants.

Narrowing In

We identified four main themes from our work. Most importantly, we gleaned that building the dashboard was not the appropriate next step in continuing this project. Given that this work was tied to the agency’s strategy, it was clear that lack of strategy alignment across agency offices and failed past dashboards reduced trust in this tool to deliver.

We recommended that the BHSC take the preliminary steps to build its internal capacity before building the dashboard.

As one of my first projects in government, this project taught me the importance of product discovery as a cost-saving and stakeholder buy-in exercise.