The Why & The How Of Clinical Decision Support

This article originally appeared on the Open Minds website.

Last month I took on a difficult question—why has there been so little adoption of measurement-based care (see Why So Little Measurement-Based Mental Health Care?)? Response rate to treatment is 87% when measurement-based care is used, compared to 63% when the standard of care is used. Even more startling, measurement-based care results in a 74% remission rate, compared to 29% when the standard of care is used. Yet, measurement-based care is an exception rather than the rule in the field.

That piece sparked a lot of reader feedback, including a few interesting perspectives from Scott Zeiter, Executive Vice President, Chief Operating Officer, Grafton Integrated Health Network. Mr. Zeiter spoke about the challenges—and rewards—of making Grafton a “measurement-based” organization when it comes to planning services for children, adolescents, and adults with complex behavioral health challenges. (For more on Grafton, check out Grafton Integrated Health Network: An OPEN MINDS Organizational Profile.)

I sat down with Mr. Zeiter to learn more about why and how Grafton implemented measurement-based care. He explained the “why” this way:

Instead of stories that make us feel good, and feedback from families and referral sources, we wanted to be more data driven. And we wanted to answer the simple question, how do we know this is effective? The oncoming freight train of value-based reimbursement (VBR) means we need to know how to make good judgments as we will now be assuming financial risk for defined outcomes—we need a better idea of what worked and what didn’t work.

His description of the “how”—the journey to measurement-based care—was even more interesting. He had four key elements on how Grafton arrived at data-informed service planning for consumers: creating a culture around outcomes, determining which evidence-based practices (EBP) Grafton would adopt, implementing the right technology to implement this model, and choosing a partner to analyze the data.

Read the full interview here.