I10 – Improving Integrated Behavioral Health Practices in Montana by Enhancing the Use of Screening Data to Inform Clinical Practices

Summary

The Montana Healthcare Foundation (MHCF) has been supporting the adoption of integrated behavioral health (IBH) across the state since 2016, through financial support for healthcare providers to adopt IBH. Over the course of the initiative, sites have consistently struggled to effectively collect, analyze, and visualize client-level data to monitor the impact of universal screenings and identify barriers to improving clinical practices. In recognizing this challenge, MHCF partnered with JG Research & Evaluation to improve data processes among IBH grantees. JG has worked directly with 41 sites, and identified common barriers to the collection, use, and interpretation of client-level data in IBH initiatives. After identifying these barriers, JG staff developed solutions tailored to address these barriers in a manner that reflects that data capacity and infrastructure of each location. One solution was to develop a web-based data dashboard, built with R Shiny, that provides site staff with easy access to aggregated clinical outcome metrics by provider, as well as a patient registry that aids sites in identifying when screeners may need to be readministered. In addition to addressing barriers in the context of a site, JG has partnered with the Montana Health Information Exchange (HIE) to develop processes for tracking ambulatory outcomes among IBH clients, with a specific focus on emergency department utilization and acute psychiatric care. During this presentation, JG and MCHF staff will provide an overview of the initiative, discuss the challenges identified by sites about using screening data to understand clinical practices, outline the strategies used by JG to address these challenges, and present the process that is being developed to link clinical-level patient data with a statewide HIE to better monitor how the IBH initiative is lowering unneeded utilization of emergency department services for behavioral health crises in Montana.