Here’s something we can all agree upon. Once you have your behavioral health treatment center up and running, you have to continuously update and improve your internal processes to stay ahead of the game. Without the right updates and proper investment in your treatment center, your organization may become stagnant and fall behind the competition.
Obviously, you don’t want that to happen!
While it may take some money and strategic planning to implement positive changes. The long-term results can increase your organization’s revenue, improve company culture, and heighten persons output success rates.
Without further ado, here are 6 genius ways to invest in your treatment center that are sure to keep your treatment center running smoothly in the long run.
1. Encourage a Person-Centered Environment
In order to improve customer satisfaction and retention, you need to become a person-centered facility. So, how do you figure out exactly what your persons served need?
It’s simple – ask them! Customer surveys and interviews are the best way to hear directly from your persons served. You can learn where you need to consider when making improvements.
Take Part in the “Not So Secret” Shopper Experience Yourself
Another strategy that will help you invest in your customers’ needs is to conduct walkthroughs or persons served experiences. Encourage investors, owners, operators, and staff to consistently or routinely go through the process. Start from initial admission screening through the initial intake to understand the person’s served experience.
For instance, have your colleagues help you pretend to be a persons and their family. Or you can walk yourself through the everyday treatment center flowchart. This will allow you to see pain points and processes that can be improved.
One area of importance to look at is the admission and intake process to see how your customer service is. Then determine if there are any points of the process that are stressful or hard to complete.
Some things you may discover may include:
- Collaboration opportunities for staff and persons served
- Redundant steps
- Difficult paperwork
- Lack of customer engagement
- Other barriers leading to poor customer retention
When you streamline these basic procedures, you can positively influence persons served satisfaction. This generates a stronger reputation for your behavioral health treatment center.
2. Support Your Staff
In order to improve your center from the get-go, you’ll need to invest in your staff. Here’s why:
Your staff works on the front lines and has the most contact with your persons served, therefore, directly influences customer satisfaction. So, it is extremely important to supply support and training for your staff. This ensures you are providing quality care for your persons served.
Grow Compassion Satisfaction & Promote Organizational Health
Many behavioral health physicians and nurses experience burnout due to the high levels of stress in the industry. By investing in staff training and providing meaningful support, you can help them manage their stress, improve morale, and prevent burnout.
One way to grow compassion satisfaction is by implementing Trauma Informed Care within your treatment center. This not only benefits the persons served but also providers and staff by reducing burnout.
At the same time, strive to promote organizational health. The greater the depth of organizational health, the more impactful the persons served experience can become. Healthy organizations measure both intra-organizational health and persons served outcomes to demonstrate the integrity of their care and services.
Make your treatment center a place both your staff and persons served want to be! This, in turn, will strengthen your company culture and the overall work ethic of the treatment center.
An exceptional staff when combined with hearty company culture is an absolute must if you want to make it in this industry. When you keep your staff happy, you will benefit in the long run because it improves retention. This saves you time and money that may have been spent on recruiting new hires.
3. Leverage Research & Development
Working within an industry that is constantly changing means there are always new discoveries. Research can help you uncover new medications, devices, or therapy practices.
When you establish clinical research and trials as a care option, you can expand your resources and lead to better client outcomes. Furthermore, as an innovative behavioral health treatment center that promotes the latest R&D, you can also help you improve your treatment center’s reputation. This will bring more persons and the right referral relationships to your doorstep!
And here’s the best part: treatment centers that take part in research and clinical trials can also receive grants and other funding.
4. Improve Billing to Save Money
The best way to improve your revenue is to fully understand and recognize where you are losing money and where you could be earning more.
Note that financial knowledge coming from different backgrounds doesn’t always translate into behavioral health because it has a unique setup. Therefore you should discuss your finances with a consultant that has experience in the industry.
This can be realized through revenue cycle management, where you can improve your:
- Documentation
- Billing
- Collections
- Reimbursement processes
The first step to improve your billing is to know how much it costs your treatment center to provide state-of-the-art care. Then, you need to balance billing and make sure you are collecting the proper payment from persons served not covered by insurance.
Next, in order to save time and money, you need to make sure you are properly managing your claims. For instance, if you are not submitting correct claims, they may get denied and leave you to cover the costs or make an appeal.
At the end of the day, you can save a lot of wasted time and money by simply tying up loose ends in your billing process.
5. Invest in Up-to-Date Technology
When was the last time you invested in your behavioral health treatment center? In particular, the integral technology that helps you run your entire organization?
If you really want to keep your treatment center as organized and efficient as possible, then consider investing in these fundamental technologies.
The Power of Integrated Telemental Health & Electronic Medical Record
First, integrated Telemental Health (TMH) is a great way to give more people access to behavioral health treatment and improve the quality of care. When you use TMH, you can automate mundane processes, which alleviates your staff’s workload so they can focus on critical tasks.
For instance, you can use TMH to automate the evaluation and improve the analysis processes. This can help you evaluate persons behaviors to better access their conditions as you can begin creating a treatment plan.
Another way to improve your treatment center’s efficiency is by implementing and taking advantage of an integrated software tool like Electronic Medical Record (EMR). This technology will help you manage all of your customer’s data, improve your workflow, and simplify tasks. Using software solutions like EMR you can integrate your current technology to leverage what you’ve already invested in.
6. Implement Partnerships & Outside Ideas
Some of the best ideas may come from businesses outside of the medical and treatment field. For example, you can learn how to incorporate collaboration in your culture or how to improve customer service from an entirely different industry! By looking at other businesses, you can learn from their successes and failures.
Not only can you get ideas from others, but you can also get support within your own industry. By working with organizations in your community that already have experience in the field, you can find better ways to reach out to those who need behavioral health treatment. When you create these partnerships, your entire organization will benefit.
You can also seek outside help through third-party consulting organizations that understand the ins-and-outs of your industry, like C4 Consulting. These types of consultants have experience working with multiple organizations all with different challenges, so they know what works best and can help you improve your processes.
Future Considerations
- The Marketing Advantage: Balancing Digital Media and Relational Marketing Solutions
- The Wisest Investment: People Helping People (invest in your staff in the right ways)
- Systems & Processes: How are you leveraging the resources you have (most companies only use about 20% of the features of technology and third party software/services)
- Measurement-Based care to inform organizational growth: outcomes after treatment aren’t as useful as outcomes measured in the treatment experience (payors are demanding more of the latter from providers)
- Focus on quality over quantity: Considering expansion, measure more than twice. (objects in the future are more challenging than they seem – C4’s mirror mantra)
- Strategic Solutions in behavioral health: understanding your fans is better than a good offense or great defense. (or Organizational Health as Organizational Strategy, or Learning as discipline rather than compliance for ensuring results).
Take Your Treatment Center to the Top with C4 Consulting
Are you ready to make the smartest investments in your behavioral health treatment center? C4 Consulting can help you implement new ideas and changes to get the best possible outcome.
Our consultants have decades of experience in the behavioral health industry and know what it takes to improve your organization’s performance.
Contact us to set up a free consultation with our team and learn more about how C4 consulting can help you.
