Over the past few months, the Pinnacle team has been working with several partner agencies to develop proactive reports to improve documentation quality and compliance. These reports can be tricky for several reasons:
Documentation requirements in the behavioral health system vary between and, sometimes, within programs. Oh, and the requirements change all the time, too.
Clinical/operations staff and technical staff often speak different languages. You really need a good translator to bridge the gap.
Once you define all the rules, prepare your report, and publish it, the process isn't finished. That's when you often find out that there are even more rules or exceptions that need to be considered.
Nevertheless, this is important work, because an accurate, proactive quality and compliance report can improve staff morale, identify training and resource gaps, and prevent expensive pay-backs for incomplete documentation.
We wanted to help with this process by providing a tool to organize and translate clinical documentation requirements into technical specifications.
The Quality & Compliance Report Development Tool is designed specifically for behavioral health clinical/operations staff working together with technical staff.
The tool can be downloaded here, or by clicking on the image to the right.
A sample completed worksheet is included in the Excel workbook. We also provided an overview and demonstration of the tool in our recent Pinnacle webinar, which you can find on the Pinnacle Health Informatics YouTube channel.
This is the first in a series of tools that we will be sharing to help behavioral health providers with designing reports. Future tools will include tracking:
Routine, urgent, & emergent access to services.
Client engagement & attendance
Staff productivity & utilization of resources
Agency financial health & performance
Fidelity to evidence-based practices
Clinical outcomes
We are looking forward to providing these tools over the next few months. Please let us know if you have suggestions for other report development needs that could benefit from a tool like this, too!